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I nNITED STATES OF AMERICA, p' 

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Evangeline. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
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JAMES R. OSGOOD «& CO., 

Publishers, Boston. 



I 




BARRY CORNWALL. 



Old A^cgzzcLtntcLTxce. 



BARRY CORNWALL 



AND SOME OF HIS FRIENDS, 



JAMES T^^' FIELDS. 



"All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 

CHAKLKS LAMB. 



is7ef. ^d^ 



BOSTON : 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

Late Ticknor &■ Fields, and Fields, Osgood, &■ Co. 
1876. 






Copyright, 1876, by 

James t Fields. 



University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 



To the Wife of Beyan Wallee Proctee, and the 
Mother of Adelaide Anne Peocter, these Recollections 
are cordially inscribed. 




Old Acquaintance, sfiall the nights 

I'otc and I once talked together. 
Be forgot like common things.^" 



' His thoughts half hid in golden dreams, 
Which make thrice fair the songs and streams 
Of Air and Earth." 



Song should breathe of scents and flowers ; 

Song should like a river flow ; 
Song should bring back scenes and hours 

That we loved, — ah, long ago!" 

Barry Cornwall. 




These pages are reprinted (with some additions) from 
" Harper's Magazine," where they first appeared a few 
months azo. 



April, 1876. 



♦'BARRY CORNWALL" 

AND SOME OF HIS FRIENDS. 




FIRST saw the poet five-and-twenty years 
£;!MJj jjo-o, in his own house in London, at No. 
11 13 Upper Harley Street, Cavendish Square. 
He was then declining into the vale of years, bvit 
his mind was still vigorous and young. My letter 
of introduction to him was written by Charles 
Sumner, and it ])roved sufficient for the beginning 
of a friendship which existed through a quarter of 
a century. My last interview^ with him occurred 
in 1869. I found him then quite feeble, but full 
of his old kindness and geniality. His speech w^as 
somewhat difficult to follow, for he had been slightly 
paralyzed not long before ; but after listening to 
him for half an hour it was easy to understand 
nearly every word he uttered. He spoke with warm 
feeling of Longfellow, who had been in London 
during that season, and had called to see his vener- 
able friend before proceeding to the Continent. 



10 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

" Was n't it good of him," said the old man, in his 
tremulous voice, " to think of vk^ before he had 
beeii in town twenty-four hours ? " He also spoke 
of his dear companion, John Kenyon, at vhose 
house we had often met in years past, and he called 
to mind a breakfast party there, saying, with deep 
feeling, " And you and I are the only ones now 
alive of all who came together that happy morn- 
ing!" 

A few months ago,* at the great age of eighty- 
seven, Bryan Waller Procter, familiarly aud honor- 
ably known in English literatnre for sixty years 
past as "BaiTy Cornwall," calmly "fell on sleep." 
The schoolmate of Lord Byron and Sir Robert 
,Peel at Harrow, the friend and companion of 
Keats, Lamb, Shelley, Coleridge, Landor, Hunt, 
Talfourd, and Rogers, the man to whom Thack- 
eray " affectionately dedicated " his " Vanity Fair," 
one of the kindest souls that ever gladdened earth, 
has now joined the great majority of England's hal- 
lowed sons of song. No poet ever left behind him 
more fragrant memories, and he will always be 
thought of as one whom his contemporaries, loved 
and honored. No harsh word will ever be spoken 
by those who have known him of the author of 
"Marcian Colonua," " Mirandola," "The Broken 
Heart," aud those charming lyrics which rank the 

* October, 1874. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 11 

poet among the first of his class. His songs will 
be sung so long as music wedded to beautiful po- 
etry is a requisition anywhere. His verses have 
gone into the Book of Fame, and such pieces as 
"Touch ns gently, Time," " Send down thy winged 
Angel, God/' "King Death," "The Sea," and 
" Belshazzar is King," will long keep his memory 
green. "VVho that ever came habitually into his 
presence can forget the tones of his voice, the ten- 
derness in his gray retrospective eyes, or the touch 
of his sympathetic hand laid on the shoulder of a 
friend ! The elements were indeed so kindly mixed 
iu him that no bitterness or rancor or jealousy 
had part or lot in his composition. No distin- 
guished person was ever more ready to help for- 
ward the rising and as yet nameless literary man 
or woman who asked his counsel and warm-hearted 
suffrage. His mere presence was sunshine to a 
new-comer into the world of letters and criticism, 
for he was always quick to encourage, and slow to 
disparage anybody. Indeed, to be human only en- 
titled any one who came near him to receive the 
gracious bounty of his goodness and courtesy. He 
made it the happiness of his life never to miss, 
whenever opportunity occurred, the chance of con- 
ferring pleasure and gladness on those who needed 
kind words and substantial aid. 

His equals in literature venerated and loved him. 
Dickens and Thackeray never ceased to regard him 



12 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

with the deepest feeling, and such men as Brown- 
ing and Tennyson and Carlyle and Forster rallied 
about him to the last. He was the delight of 
all those interesting men and women who ha- 
bitually gathered around Rogers's famous table in 
the olden time, for his manner had in it all the 
courtesy of genius, without any of that chance 
asperity so common in some liteiary circles. The 
shyness of a scholar brooded continually over him 
and made him reticent, but he was never silent 
from ill-humor. His was that true modesty so ex- 
cellent in ability, and so rare in celebrities petted 
for a long time in society. His was also that happy 
alchemy of mind which transmutes disagreeable 
things into golden and ruby colors like the dawn. 
His temperament was the exact reverse of Fuseli's, 
who complained that "nature put him out." A 
beautiful spirit has indeed passed away, and the 
name of " Barry Cornwall," beloved in both hemi- 
spheres, is now sanctified afresh by the seal of eter- 
nity so recently stamped upon it. 

It was indeed a privilege for a young American, 
on his first travels abroad, to have "Barry Corn- 
wall " for his host in London. As I recall the 
memorable days and nights of that long-ago period, 
I wonder at the good fortune which brought me 
into such relations with him, and I linger with 
profound gratitude over his many acts of unmerited 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 13 

kindness. One of the most intimate rambles I 
ever took with him was in 1851, when we started 
one mornins; from a book-shop in Piccadilly, where 
we met accidentally. I had been in London only a 
couple of days, and had not yet called upon him for 
lack of time. Several years had elapsed since we had 
met, but he began to talk as if we had parted only 
a few hours before. At first I thought his mind 
was impaired by age, and that he had forgotten 
how long it was since we had spoken together. I 
imagined it possible that he mistook me for some 
one else ; but very soon I found that his memory 
was not at fault, for in a few minutes he began to 
question me about old friends in America, and to 
ask for information concerning the probable sea-sick 
horrors of an Atlantic voyage. " I suppose," said 
he, " knowing your infirmity, you found it hard 
work to stand on your immaterial legs, as Hood 
used to call Lamb's quivering limbs." Sauntering 
out into the street, he went on in a quaintly humor- 
ous way to imagine what a rough voyage must be 
to a real suiferer, and thus walking gayly along, we 
came into Leadenhall Street. There he pointed out 
the oflace where his old friend and fellow-magazin- 
ist, " Elia," spent so many years of hard w^ork from 
ten until four o'clock of every day. Being in a 
mood for reminiscence, he described the Wednes- 
day evenings he used to spend with " Charles and 
Mary " and their friends around the old "mahogany- 



14 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

tree " in Russell Street. I remember he tried to 
give me an idea of how Lamb looked and dressed, 
and how he stood bending forward to welcome his 
gnests as they arrived in his humble lodgings. 
Procter thought nothing unimportant that might 
serve in any way to illustrate character, and so he 
seemed to wish that I might get an exact idea of 
the charming person both of us prized so ardently 
and he had known so intimately. Speaking of 
Lamb's habits, he said he bad never known his 
friend to drink immoderately except upon one occa- 
sion, and he observed that "Elia," like Dickens, 
was a small and delicate eater. "With faltering 
voice he told me of Lamb's " givings away " to 
needy, impoverished friends whose necessities were 
yet greater than his own. His secret charities were 
constant and unfailing, and no one ever suffered 
hunger when he was by. He could not endure to 
see a fellow-creature in want if he had the means 
to feed him. Thinking, from a depression of spir- 
its which Procter in his young manhood was once 
laboring under, that perhaps he was in want of 
money, Lamb looked him earnestly in the face as 
they were walking one day in the country together, 
and blurted out, in his stammering way, " My dear 
boy, I have a hundred-pound note in my desk that 
I really don't know what to do with : oblige me by 
taking it and getting the confounded thing out of 
my keeping." " I was in no need of money," 




COLERIDGE. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 17 

said Procter, "and I declined the gift; but it was 
hard work to make Lamb believe that I was not in 
an impecunious condition." 

Speaking of Lamb's sister Mary, Procter quoted 
Hazlitt's saying that " Mary Lamb was the most 
rational and wisest woman he had ever been ac- 
quainted with." As, we went along some of the 
more retired streets in the old city, we had also, I 
remember, much gossip about Coleridge and his 
manner of reciting his poetry, especially when 
" Elia " happened to be among the listeners, for the 
philosopher put a high estimate upon Lamb's crit- 
ical judgment. The author of " The Ancient Mari- 
ner" always had an excuse for any bad habit to 
which he was himself addicted, and he told Proc- 
ter one day that perhaps snuff was the final cause 
of the human nose. In connection with Coleridge 
we had much reminiscence of such interesting per- 
sons as the Novellos, Martin Burney, Talfourd, and 
Crabb Robinson, and a store of anecdotes in w'hich 
Haydon, Manning, Dyer, and Godwin figured at 
full length. Li course of conversation I asked my 
companion if he thought Lamb had ever been real- 
ly in love, and he told me interesting things of Hes- 
ter Savory, a young Quaker girl of Pentonville, who 
inspired the poem embalming the name of Hester 
forever, and of Fanny Kelly, the actress with " the 
divine plain face," who will always live in one of 
" Elia's " most exquisite essays. "He had a rev- 



18 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

erence for the sex," said Procter, "and there were 
tender spots in his heart that time eoiikl never en- 
tirely cover up or conceal." 

During our walk we stepped into Christ's Hos- 
pital, and turned to the page on its i-ccord book 
where together we read this entry : " October 9, 
1782, Charles Lamb, aged sev^n years, son of John 
Lamb, scrivener, and Elizabeth his wife." 

It was a lucky morying when I dropped in to 
bid " good morrow " to the poet as I was passing 
his house one day, for it was then he took from 
among his treasures and gave to me an autograph 
letter addressed to himself by Charles Lamb in 
1829. I found the dear old man alone and in his 
library, sitting at his books, with the windows wide 
open, letting in the spring odors. Quoting, as I en- 
tered, some lines from Wordsworth embalming May 
mornings, he began to talk of the older poets who 
had worshipped nature with the ardor of lovers, and 
his eyes lighted up with pleasure when I happened 
to remember some almost forgotten stanza from 
England's " Helicon." It was an easy transition 
from the old bards to " Elia," and he soon went 
on in his fine enthusiastic way to relate several an- 
ecdotes of his eccentric friend. As I rose to take 
leave he said, — 

" Have I ever given yon one of Lamb's letters 
to carrv home to Auicrica ? " 



OLD ACQUAIXTA^sCE. 21 

" Xo/' I replied, " and you must not part with 
the least scrap of a note in ' Elia's ' handwriting. 
Such things are too precious to be risked on a sea- 
voyage to another hemisphere." 

" America ought to share with England in these 
things," he rejoined ; and leading me up to a sort 
of cabinet in the library, he unlocked a drawer and 
got out a package of time-stained papers. " Ah," 
said he, as he turned over the golden leaves, " here 
is something you will like to handle." I unfolded 
the sheet, and lo ! it was in Keats's handwriting, 
the sonnet on first looking into Chapman's Homer. 
" Keats gave it to me," said Procter, " many, many 
years ago," and then he proceeded to read, in tones 
tremulous with delight, these undying lines ; — 

" Much have I travelled in tlie realms of gold. 
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ; 
Round many Western islands have 1 been 
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne ; 
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken, 
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
Looked at each other M'ith a wild surmise — 
Silent, upon a peak in Darien." 

I sat gazing at the man who had looked on Keats 
in the flush of his young genius, and wondered at 



22 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

my good fortune. As the living poet folded up 
again the faded manuscript of the illustrious dead 
one, and laid it reverently in its place, I felt grate- 
ful for the honor thus vouchsafed to a wandering 
stranger in a foreign land, and wished that other 
and worthier votaries of English letters might have 
been present to share with me the boon of such an 
interview. Presently my hospitable friend, still 
rummaging among the past, drew out a letter, which 
was the one, he said, he had been looking after. 
" Cram it into your pocket," he cried, " for I 

hear coming down stairs, and perhaps she 

won't let you carry it otf ! " The letter is addressed 
to B. "VV. Procter, Esq., 10 Lincoln's Inn, New 
Square. I give the entire epistle here just as it 
stands in the original which Procter handed me 
that memorable May morning. He told me that 
the law question raised in this epistle was a sheer 
fabrication of Lamb's, gotten up by him to puzzle 
his young correspondent, the conveyancer. The 
coolness ref. rred to between himself and Robinson 
and Talfourd, Procter said, was also a fiction invented 
by Lamb to carry out his legal mystification. 

Jan'y 19, 1829. 
"My dear Procter, — 1 am ashamed to have not taken 
the drift of your pleasant letter, which I find to have been 
pure invention. But jokes are not suspected in Boeotian 
Enfield. We are plain people, and our talk is of corn, and 
cattle, and Waltham markets. Besides I was a little out of 
sorts when I received it. The fact is, I am involved in a 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 23 

case which has fretted me to death, and 1 liave no reliance 
except on you to extricate me. I am sure you will jrive me 
your best legal advice, ha\ iug; no professional friend l)esides 
but Robinson and Talfourd, with neither of whom at present 
I am on the best terms. My brother's widow left a will, 
made during the lifetime of my brother, in which I am 
named sole Executor, by which she bequeaths forty acres 
of arable pro])erty, which it seems she held under Covert 
Baron, unknown to my Brother, to the heirs of the body of 
Elizabeth Dowden, her married daughter by a first husband, 
in fee simple, recoverable by tine — invested property, 
mind, for there is the difticulty — subject to leet and quit 
rent — in short, worded in the most guarded terms, to 
shut out the property from Isaac -Dowden the husband. 
Intelligence has just come of the death of this person in 
India, where he made a will, entailing this property (which 
seem'd entangled enough already) to the heirs of his l)ody, 
that should not be born of his wife ; for it seems by the 
Law in India natural children can recover. They have put 
the cause into Exchequer Process liere, removed by Certio- 
rari from the Native Courts, and the question is whether I 
should as Executor, try the cause here, or again re-remove 
to the Supreme Sessions at Bangalore, which I understand 
1 can, or plead a hearing before the Privy Council here. 
As it involves all tlie little property of Elizabeth Dowden, 
I am anxious to take the fittest steps, and what may be the 
least expensive. For God's sake assist me, for the case is so 
embarrassed that it deprives me of sleep and appetite. M. 
Burney thinks there is a Case like it in Chapt. 170 Sect. 5 
in Fearn's Cont'nujent Remainders. Pray read it over with 
him dispassionately, and let me have the result. The com- 
plexity lies in the questionable power of the husband to 
alienate in usum enfeoffments whereof he was only collater- 
ally seized, etc." 

[On tLe leaf at this place there are some words 
ill another hand. — F.] 



24 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

" The above is some of M. Burney's memoranda, which he 
has left here, and you may cut out and give him. I had 
another favour to beg, wliicli is the beggarliest of beggings. 
A few lines of verse for a young friend's Album (six will be 
enough). M. Burney will tell you who she is I want 'em 
for. A girl of gold. Six lines — make 'em eight — signed 

Barry C . They need not be very good, as I chiefly 

want 'em as a foil to mine. But 1 shall be seriously obliged 
by any refuse scrap. We are in the last ages of the world, 
when St. Paul prophesied that women should be ' head- 
strong, lovers of their own wills, having Albums.' I fled 
hither to escape the Albumean persecution, and had not 
been in my new house 24 hours, Avlien the Daughter of the 
next house came in with a friend's Album to beg a contri- 
bution, and the following day intimated she had one of 
her own. Two more have sprung up since. If I take the 
wings of the morning and fly unto tlie uttermost parts of 
the earth, there will Albums be. New Holland has Albums. 
But the age is to be complied with. M. B. will tell you 
the sort of girl 1 request the 10 lines for. Somewhat of a 
pensive cast what you admire. The lines may come before 
tlie Law question, as that can not be deteraiined before 
Hilary Term, and 1 wish your deliberate judgment on that. 
The other may be flimsy and superficial. And if you have 
not burnt your returned letter pray re-send it me as a 
monumental token of my stupidity. 'T was a little un- 
thinking of you to touch upon a sore subject. Why, by 
dabbling in those accursed Annuals I have become a by- 
word of infamy all over the kingdom. I have sicken'd de- 
cent women for asking me to write in Albums. There be 
' dark jests ' abroad, Master Cornwall, and some riddles 
may live to be clear'd up. And 't is n't every saddle is put 
on the right steed. And forgeries and false Gospels are not 
peculiar to the age following the Apostles. And some tubs 
don't stand on their right bottom. Which is all 1 wish to 
say in these ticklish Times — and so your servant, 

"Chs. Lamb." 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 27 

. At the age of seventy-seven Procter was invited 
to print his recollections of Charles Lamb, and his 
volume was welcomed in both hemispheres as a 
pleasant addition to " Eliana." During the last 
eighteen years of Lamb's life Procter knew him 
most intimately, and his chronicles of visits to the 
little gamboge-colored house in Enfield are charming 
pencillings of memory. "When Lamb and his sister, 
tired of housekeeping, went into lodging and board- 
ing with T W , their sometime next-door 

neighbor — who, Lamb said, had one joke and forty 
pounds a year, upon which he retired in a green old 
age — Procter still kept up his friendly visits to his 
old associate. And after the brother and sister 
moved to their last earthly retreat in Edmonton, 
where Charles died in 1834, Procter still paid them 
regular visits of love and kindness. And after 
Charles's death, when Mary went to live at a house 
in St. John's Wood, her unfailing friend kept up 
his cheering calls there till she set out " for that 
unknown and silent shore," on the 20th of May, in 
1847. 

Procter's conversation was full of endless delight 
to his friends. His "asides " were sometimes full 
of exquisite touches. I remember one evening when 
Carlyle was present and rattling on against Ameri- 
can institutions, half comic and half serious, Proc- 
ter, who sat near me, kept up a constant under- 
breath of commentary, taking exactly the other 



28 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

side. Caiiyle was full of horse-play over the char- 
acter of George Washington, whom he never 
vouchsafed to call anything but George. He said 
our first President was a good surveyor, and knew 
how to measure timber, and that was about all. 
Procter kept whispering to me all the while Carlyle 
was discoursing, and going over Washington's fine 
traits to the disparagement of everything Carlyle 
was laying down as gospel. I was listening to both 
these distinguished men at the same time, and it 
was one of the most curious experiences in conver- 
sation I ever happened to enjoy. 

I was once present when a loud-voiced person of 
quality, ignorant and supercilious, was inveighing 
against the want of taste commonly exhibited by 
artists when they chose their wives, saying they 
almost always selected inferior women. Procter, 
sitting next to me, put his hand on my shoulder, 
and, with a look expressive of ludicrous pity and 
contempt for the idiotic speaker, whispered, " And 
yet Vandyck married the daughter of Earl Gower, 
poor fellow ! " The mock solemnity of Procter's 
manner was irresistible. It had a wink in it that 
really embodied the genius of fun and sarcasm. 

Talking of the ocean with him one day, he re- 
vealed this curious fact : although he is the author 
of one of the most stirring and popular sea-songs 
in the language, — 

"The sea, the sea, the open sea! " — • 




BROWNING. 



OLD ACQUAIXTANCE. 81 

he said he had rarely been upon the tossing element, 
having a great fear of being made ill by it. 1 think 
he told me he had never dared to cross the Channel 
even, and so had never seen Paris. He said, like 
many others, he delighted to gaze upon the waters 
from a safe place on land, but had a horror of living 
on it even for a few hours. I recalled to his recol- 
lection his own lines, — 

" I 'ni on the sea ! 1 'ni on the sea ! 
I am where I woukl ever be," — 

and he shook his head, and laughingly declared T 
must have misquoted his words, or that Dibdin had 
written the piece and put " Barry Cornwairs " sig- 
nature to it. We had, I remember, a great deal of 
fun over the poetical lies, as he called them, which 
bards in all ages had perpetrated in their verse, and 
he told me some stories of English poets, over 
which we made merry as we sat together in pleasant 
Cavendish Square that summer evening. 

His world-renowned song of "The Sea " he after- 
ward gave me in his own handwriting, and it is 
still among my autographic treasures. 

It was Procter who fli-st in my hearing, twenty- 
five years ago, put such an estimate on the poetry 
of Robert Browning that I could not delay any 
longer to make acquaintance with his wi'itings. I 
remember to have been startled at hearing the man 
who in his day had known so many poets declare 
that Browning was the peer of any one who had 



32 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

written in this century, and that, on the whole, his 
genius had not been excelled in his (Procter's) time. 
"Mind what I say," insisted Procter; " Browning 
will make an enduring name, and add another su- 
premely great poet to England." 

Procter could sometimes be prompted into de- 
scribing that brilliant set of men and women who 
were in the habit of congregating at Lady Bless- 
ington's, and I well recollect his description of 
young N. P. Willis as he first appeared in her salon. 
" The young traveller came among us," said Proc- 
ter, " enthusiastic, handsome, and good-natured, 
and took his place beside D'Orsay, Bulwer, Disra- 
eli, and the other dandies as naturally as if he had 
been for years a London man about town. He Avas 
full of fresh talk concerning his own country, and we 
all admired his cleverness in compassing so aptly 
all the little newnesses of the situation. He was 
ready on all occasions, a little too ready, some of 
the habitues of the salon thought, and they could 
not understand his cool and quite-at-home manners. 
He became a favorite at first trial, and laid himself 
out determined to please and be pleased. His ever 
kind and thoughtful attention to others won him 
troops of friends, and I never can forget his un- 
wearied goodness to a sick child of mine, with 
whom, night after night, he would sit by the bed- 
side and watch, thus relieving the worn-out family 
in a way that was very tender and self-sacrificing." 



OLD ACQUAIXTAXGE. 35 

Of Lady Blessington's tact, kindness, and remark- 
able beauty Procter always spoke with ardor, and 
abated nothing fi'om the popular idea of that fascinat- 
ing person. He thought she had done more in her 
time to institute good feeling and social intercourse 
among men of letters than any other lady in Eng- 
land, and he gave her eminent credit for bringing 
forward the rising talent of the metropolis without 
waiting to be prompted by a public verdict. As 
the poet described her to me as she moved through 
her exquisite apartments, surrounded by all the lux- 
uries that naturally connect themselves with one of 
her commanding position in literature and art, her 
radiant and exceptional beauty of person, her frank 
and cordial manners, the wit, wisdom, and grace of 
her speech, I thought of the fair Giovanna of Naples 
as painted in " Bianca Visconti " : — 

" Gods ! what a light enveloped her! 
Her beauty 
Was of that order that the universe 

Seemed govei-ned l)y lier motion 

The pomp, the music, the bright sun in heaven, 
Seemed glorious by her leave." 

One of the most agreeable men in London liter- 
ary society during Procter's time was the com- 
panionable and ever kind-hearted John Kenyon. 
He was a man compacted of all the best qualities 
of an incomparable good-nature. His friends used 
to call him '" the apostle of cheerfulness." He 



36 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

could not endure a long lace tuider his roof, and 
declined to see the dark side of anything. He 
wrote verses almost like a poet, but no one sur- 
passed him in genuine admiration for whatever was 
excellent in others. No happiness w^as so great to 
him as the confei'ring of happiness on others, and I 
am glad to write myself his eternal debtor for much 
of my enjoyment in England, for he introduced me 
to many lifelong friendships, and he inaugurated 
for me much of that felicity which springs from 
intercourse with men and women whose books are 
the solace of our lifelong existence. How often 
have T seen Kenyou and Procter chirping together 
over an old quarto that had floated down from an 
early century, or rejoicing together over a well-worn 
letter in a family portfolio of treasures ! They were 
a pair of veteran brothers, and there was never a 
flaw in their long and loving intercourse. 

In a letter which Procter wrote to me in iMarch, 
1857, he thus refers to his old friend, then lately 
dead : " Everybody seems to be dying hei'eabouts, — 
one of my colleagues, one of my relations, one of 
my servants, three of them in one week, the last 
one in my own house. And now I seem fit for 
little else myself. My dear old friend Kenyon is 
dead. There never w'as a man, take him for all in 
all, with more amiable, attractive qualities. A kind 
friend, a good master, a generous and judicious dis- 
penser of his wealth, honorable, sweet-tempered. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 37 

r.nd serene, and genial as a summer's day. It is 
true that he has left me a solid mai'k of his friend- 
ship. I did not expect anything ; but if to like a 
man sincerely deserved such a mark of his regard, I 
deserved it. I doubt if he has left one person who 
reaUy liked him more than I did. Yes, one — I 

think one — a woman I get old and weak 

and stupid. That pleasant journey to Niagara, that 
dip into your Indian summer, all such thoughts are 
over. I shall never see Italy ; 1 shall never see 
Paris. My future is before me, — a very limited 
landscape, with scarcely one old friend left in it. I 
see a smallish room, with a bow-window looking 
south, a bookcase full of books, three or four 
drawings, and a library chair and table (once the 
property of my old friend Kenyon — I am writing 
on the table now), and you have the greater part of 
the vision before you. Is this the end of all things ? 
1 believe it is pretty much like most scenes in the 
tifth act, when the green (or black) curtain is about 
to drop and tell you that the play of Hamlet or of 
John Smith is over. But wait a little. There will 
be another piece, in which John Smith the younger 
will figure, and quite eclipse his old, stupid, wrinkled, 
useless, time-slaughtered parent. The king is dead, 
— long live the king ! " 

Kenyon was very fond of Americans, Professor 
Ticknor and Mr. George S. Hillard being especially 
dear to him. I remember hearing him say one day 



38 OLD ACQUAIXTANCE. 

that the " best prepared " young: foreigner he had 
ever met, who had come to see Europe, was Mr. 
Hillard. One day at his dinner-table, in the pres- 
ence of Mrs. Jameson, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, Walter 
Savage Landor, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Browning, 
and the Procters, I heard him declai-e that one of 
the best talkers on any subject that might be started 
at the social board was the author of " Six Months 
in Italy." 

It was at a breakfast in Kenyon's house that I 
first met Walter Savage Landor, whose wi-itings are 
full of verbal legacies to posterity. As 1 entered 
the room with Procter, Landor was in the midst of 
an eloquent harangue on the high art of portraiture. 
Procter had been lately sitting to a daguerreotypist 
for a picture, and Mrs. Jameson, who was very fond 
of the poet, had arranged the camera for that occa- 
sion. Landor was holding the picture in his hand, 
declaring that it had never been surpassed as a 
specimen of that particular art. The grand-looking 
author of " Pericles and Aspasia" was standing in 
the middle of the room when we entered, and his 
voice sounded like an e.xplosion of first-class artil- 
lery. Seeing Procter enter, he immediately began 
to address him compliments in high-sounding Latin. 
Poor modest Procter pretended to stop his ears that 
he might not listen to Landor's eulogistic phrases. 
Kenyon came to the rescue by declaring the break- 
fast had been waiting half an hour. When we ar- 




LANOOR. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 41 

rived at the table Landor asked Procter to join him 
on an expedition into Spain which he was then con- 
templating. "No," said Procter, "for I cannot 
even ' walk Spanish,' and having never crossed the 
Chann ;1, I do not intend to begin now." 

" Never crossed the Channel ! " roared Landor, — • 
" never saw Napoleon Bonaparte ! " He then began 
to tell ns how the young Corsican looked when he 
first saw him, saying that he had the olive com- 
plexion and roundness of face of a Greek girl ; that 
the consul's voice was deep and melodious, but un- 
truthful in tone. While w^e were eating breakfast 
he went on to describe his Italian travels in early 
youth, telling us that he once saw Shelley and Byron 
meet in the doorway of a hotel in Pisa. Landor 
had lived in Italy many years, for he detested the 
climate of his native country, and used to say " one 
could only live comfortably in England who was rich 
enough to have a solar system of his own." 

The Prince of Carpi said of Erasmus he was so 
thin-skinned that a fly would draw blood from him. 
The author of the " Imaginary Conversations " had 
the same infirmity. A very little thing would dis- 
turb him for hours, and his friends were never sure 
of his equanimity. I wms present once when a 
blundering friend trod unwittingly on his favorite 
prejudice, and Landor went off instanter like a blas- 
pheming torpedo. There were three things in the 
world which received no quarter at his hands, and 



42 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

when in the slightest degree he scented hypocrisy, 
Pharisaism, or tyranny, straightway he became furi- 
ous, and laid about him like a mad giant. 

Procter told me that when Laudor got into a 
passion, his rage was sometimes uncontrollable. 
The fiery spirit knew his weakness, but his anger 
quite overmastered him in spite of himself. " Keep 
your temper, Laudor," somebody said to him one 
day when he was raging. " That is just what I 
don't wish to keep," he cried ; " I wish to be rid 
of such an infamous, ungovernable thing. I don't 
wish to keep my temper." Whoever wishes to get 
a good look at Landor will not seek for it alone in 
John Forster's interesting life of the old man, ad- 
mirable as it is, but will turn to Dickens's " Bleak 
House" for side glances at the great author. In 
that vivid story Dickens has made his friend Landor 
sit for the portrait of Lawrence Boythorn. The 
very laugh that made the whole house vibrate, the 
roundness and fulness of voice, the fury of superla- 
tives, are all given in Dickens's best manner, and no 
one who has ever seen Landor for half an hour 
could possibly mistake Boythorn for anybody else. 
Talking the matter over once with Dickens, he said, 
" Landor always took that presentation of himself 
in hearty good-humor, and seemed rather proud of 
the picture." This is Dickens's portrait : " He was 
not only a very handsome old gentleman, upright and 
stalwart, with a massive gray head, a fine composure 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 43 

of face when silent, a figure that might have become 
corpulent but for his being so continually in earnest 
that he gave it no rest, and a chin that might have 
subsided into a double chin but for the vehement em- 
phasis in w^hich it was constantly required to assist ; 
but he was such a true gentleman in his manner, so 
chivalrously polite, his face was lighted by a smile 
of so much sweetness and tenderness, and it seemed 
so plain that he had nothing to hide, that really I 
could not he]]) looking at him with equal pleasure, 
whether he smilingly conversed with Ada and me, 
or was led by Mr. Jarndyce into some great volley 
of superlatives, or threw up his head like a blood- 
hound, and gave out that tremendous Ha ! ha ! 
ha!" 

Landor's energetic gravity, when he was propos- 
ing some colossal impossibility, the observant novel- 
ist would naturally seize on, for Dickens was always 
on the lookout for exaggerations in human language 
and conduct. It was at Procter's table I heard 
Dickens describe a scene which transpired after 
the publication of the " Old Curiosity Shop." It 
seems that the first idea of Little Nell occurred to 
Dickens when he was on a birthday visit to Landor, 
then living in Bath. The old man was residing in 
lodgings in St. James Square, in that city, and ever 
after connected Little Nell with that particular 
spot. No character in prose fiction was a greater 
favorite with Landor, and one day, years after the 



44 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

story was published, he burst out with a tremendous 
emphasis, and declared the one mistake of his life 
was that he had not purchased the house in Bath, 
and then and there burned it to the ground, so that 
no meaner association should ever desecrate the 
birthplace of Little Nell ! 

It was Procter's old schoolmaster (Dr. Drury, 
head-master of Harrow) who was the means of in- 
troducing Edmund Kean, the great actor, on the 
London stage. Procter delighted to recall the 
many theatrical triumphs of the eccentric tragedian, 
and the memoir which he printed of Kean will al- 
ways be read with iuterest. I heard the poet one 
evening describe the ])layer most graphically as he 
appeared in Sir Giles Overreach in 1816 at Drury 
Lane, when he produced such an effect on Lord 
Byron, who sat that night in a stage-box with Tom 
Moore. His lordship was so overcome by Kean's 
magnificent acting that he fell forward in a convul- 
sive fit, and it was some time before he regained 
his wonted composure. Douglas Jerrold said that 
Kean's appearance in Shakespeare's Jew was like a 
chapter out of Genesis, aud all who have seen the 
incomparable actor speak of his tiger-like power 
and infinite grace as unrivalled. 

At Procter's house the best of England's cele- 
brated men and women assembled, and it was a kind 
of enchantment to converse with the ladies one met 
there. It was indeed a privilege to be received by 




Miss PROCTER. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 47 

the hostess herself, for Mrs. Procter was not only- 
sure to be the most brilliant person among her 
guests, but she practised habitually that exquisite 
courtesy toward all which renders even a stranger, 
unwonted to London drawing-rooms, free from awk- 
wardness and that constraint which are almost in- 
separable from a first appearance. 

Among the persons I have seen at that house of 
urbanity in London I distinctly recall old Mrs. 
Montague, the mother of Mrs. Procter. She had 
met Robert Burns in Edinburgh when he first came 
up to that city to bring out his volume of poems. 
" I have seen many a handsome man in my time," 
said the old lady one day to us at dinner, " but 
never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns 
kept flashing from under his beautiful brow." Mrs. 
Montague was much interested in Charles Sumner, 
and predicted for him all the eminence of his after- 
position. With a certain other American visitor 
she had no patience, and spoke of him to me as a 
" note of interrogation, too curious to be comfort- 
able." 

I distinctly recall Adelaide Procter as I first saw 
her on one of my early visits to her father's house. 
She was a shy, bright girl, and the poet drew my 
attention to her as she sat reading in a corner of 
the library. Looking at the young maiden, intent 
on her book, I remembered that exquisite sonnet in 
her father's volume, bearing date November, 1825, 



4i8 OLD A C Q U A I X T A ]S' C E . 

addressed to the infant just a month after her 
birth : — 

" Child of my heart ! My sweet, beloved First-born ! 
Thou dove who tidings t)ring'st of calmer hours! 
Thou rainbow who dost shine when all the showers 
Are past or passing ! Rose which liath no thorn, 
No spot, no blemish, — pure and unforlorn, 
Untouched, untainted ! O my Flower of flowers ! 
More welcome than to bees are summer bowers, 
To stranded seamen life-assuring morn ! 
Welcome, a thousand welcomes ! Care, who clings 
Round all, seems loosening now its serpent fold : 
New hope springs upward ; and the l)right world seems 
Cast back into a youth of endless springs 1 
Sweet mother, is it so? or grow I old, 
Bewildered in divine Elysian dreams? " 

I whispered in the poet's ear my admiration of 
the sonnet and the beautiful subject of it as we sat 
looking at her absorbed in the volume on her knees. 
Procter, in response, murmui'ed some words expres- 
sive of his joy at having such a gift from God to 
gladden his affectionate heart, and he told me after- 
ward what a comfort Adelaide had always been to 
Ms household. He described to me a visit Words- 
worth made to his house one day, and how gentle 
the old man's aspect was Avlien he looked at the 
children. " He took the hand of my dear Adelaide 
in his," said Procter, " and spoke some words to 
her, the recollection of which helped, perhaps, with 
other things, to incline her to poetry." "When a 
■little child " the golden-tressed Adelaide," as the 




WORDSWORTH. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 51 

poet calls her in one of his songs, must often have 
heard her father read aloud his own poems as they 
came fresh from the fount of song, and the impres- 
sion no doubt wrought upon her young imagination 
a spell she could not resist. On a sensitive mind 
like hers such a piece as the " Petition to Time " 
could not fail of producing its full effect, and no 
girl of her temperament would be unmoved by the 
music of words like these : — 

" Touch us gently, Time ! 

Let us glide adown thy stream 
Gently, as we sometimes glide 

Through a quiet dream. 
Humble voyagers are we, 
Husband, wife, and children three. 
(One is lost, an angel, Hed 
To the azure overhead.) 

" Touch us gently. Time ! 

We 've not proud nor soaring wings: 
Our ambition, oxir content, 

Lie in simple things. 
Humble voyagers are we. 
O'er Life's dim unsounded sea, 
Seeking only some calm chme -. 
Touch us gently, gentle Time ! " 

Adelaide Procter's name will always be sweet in 
the annals of English poetry. Her place was as- 
sured from the time when she made her modest 
advent, in 1853, in the columns of Dickens's 
" Household Words," and everything she wrote 
fi'om that period onward until she died gave evi- 



52 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

deuce of striking and peculiar talent. I have heard 
Dickens describe how she tirst bea,an to protfer con- 
tributions \p his columns over a feigned name, that 
of INIiss Mary Berwick ; how he came to think that 
his unknown correspondent must be a governess ; 
how, as time went on, he learned to vahie his new 
contributor for her self-reliance and punctuality, — 
qualities upon which Dickens always placed a high 
value ; how at last, going to dine one day with his 
old friends the Procters, he launched enthusiasti- 
cally out in praise of Mary Berwick (the writer 
herself, Adelaide Procter, sitting at the table) ; and 
how the delighted mother, being in the secret, re- 
vealed, with tears of joy, the real name of the young 
aspirant. Although Dickens has told the whole 
story most feelingly in an introduction to Miss 
Procter's " Legends and Lyrics," issued after her 
death, to hear it from his own li])s and sympathetic 
heart, as I have done, was, as nuiy be imagined, 
something better even than reading his pathetic 
words on the printed page. 

One of the most interesting ladies in London 
literary society iu the period of which I am writing 
was Mrs. Jameson, the dear and honored friend of 
Procter and his family. During many years of her 
later life she stood in the relation of consoler to her 
sex in England. Women iu mental anguish needing 
consolation and counsel fled to her as to a convent 
for protection and guidan(.-e. Her published writ- 




MRS JAMESON. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 55 

ings established such a claim upon her sympathy in 
the hearts of her readers that uiuoh of her time for 
twenty years before she died was spent in helping 
others, by correspondence and personal contact, to 
submit to the sorrows God had cast upon them. 
She believed, with Milton, that it is miserable enough 
to be blind, but still more miserable not to be able to 
bear blindness. Her own earlier life had been dark- 
ened by griefs, and she knew from a deep experience 
what it was to enter the cloud and stand waiting 
and hoping in the shadows. In her instructive and 
delightful society I spent many an hour twenty 
years ago in the houses of Procter and Rogers and 
Kenyon. Procter, knowing my admiration of the 
Kemble family, frequently led the conversation up 
to that regal line which included so many men 
and women of genius. Mrs. Jameson was never 
weary of being questioned as to the legitimate su- 
premacy of Mrs. Siddons and her nieces, Fanny 
and Adelaide Kemble. While Rogers talked of 
Garrick, and Procter of Kean, she had no enthusi- 
asms that were not bounded in by thr)se fine spirits 
whom she had watched and worshipped from her 
earliest years. 

Now and then in the garden of life we get that 
special bite out of the sunny side of a peach. One 
of my own memorable experiences in that way came 
in this wise. I had heard, long before I went 
abroad, so much of the singing of the youngest 



56 O L D A C Q U A I N T A N C E . 

child of the "Olympian dynasty," Adelaide Kem- 
ble, so much of a bi'ief career crowded with tri- 
umphs on the lyric stage, that I longed, if it might 
be possible, to listen to "the true daughter of her 
race." Th ; rest of her family for years had been, 
as it were, "nourished on Shakespeare," and 
achievpd greatness in that high walk of genius ; 
but now came one who could interpret Mozart, 
Bellini, and Mercadante, one who could equal what 
Pasta and Malibran and Pcrsiani and Grisi had 
taught the Avorld to understand and worship. 
" Ah ! " said a friend, " if you could only hear her 
sing ' Casta Diva ! ' " " Yes," said another, " and 
* Anld Robin Gray ! ' " No wonder, I thought, at 
the universal enthusiasm for a vocnl and lyrical 
artist who can alternate with equal power from 
"Casta Diva" to " Auld Robin Gray." I must 
hear her! She had left the stage, after a brief 
glory upon it, but as Madame Sartoris she some- 
times sang at home to her guests. 

" We are invited to hear some music this even- 
ing," said Procter to me one day, " and you must 
go with us." I went, and our hostess was the 
once magnificent prima donna I At intervals 
throughout the evening, with a voice 

" That crowds and hurries and precipitates 
With thick fast warble its delicious notes," 

she poured out her full soul in melody. "We all 
know her now as the author of that exquisite 



OLD A (J (.1 U A I N T A N C E . Di 

" Week in a French Countiy-House," and her 
faseinating book somehow always mingles itself in 
my memory with the enchanted evening when I 
heard her sing. As she sat at the piano in all her 
majestic beauty, I imagined her a sort of later St. 
Cecilia, and could have wished for another Raphael 
to paint her worthily. Ileniy Chorley, who was 
present on that memorable evening, seemed to be in 
a kind of nervous rajjture at hearing again the su- 
preme and willing singer. Procter moved away 
into a dim corner of the room, and held his tremu- 
lous hand over his eyes. The old poet's sensitive 
spirit seemed at times to be going out on the 
breath of the glorious artist who was thrilling us 
all with her power. Mi"S. Jameson bent forward 
to watch every motion of her idol, looking applause 
at every noble passage. Another lady, whom 1 did 
not know, was tremulous with excitement, and I 
could well imagine what might have taken ])lnce 
when the " impassioned chantress " sang and enacted 
Semiramide as T have heard it described. Every 
one present was inspired by her fine mien, as well 
as by her transcendent voice. Mozart, Rossini, 
Bellini, Cherubini, — how she flung herself that 
night, with all her gifts, into Iheir highest com- 
positions ! As she rose and was walking away 
from the piano, after singing an air from the 
"Medea" with a pathos that no musically unedu- 
cated pen like mine can or ought to attempt a 



68 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

description of, some one intercepted her and whis- 
pered a request. Again she turned, and walked 
toward the instrument like a queen among her ad- 
miring court, A flash of lightning, followed by a 
peal of thunder that jarred the house, stopped her 
for a moment on her way to the piano. A sudden 
summer tempest was gathering, and crash after 
crash made it impossible for her to begin. As she 
stood waiting for the " elemental fury " to subside, 
her attitude was quite worthy of the niece of Mrs. 
Siddons. "When the thunder had grown less fre- 
quent, she threw back her beautiful classic head 
and touched the keys. The air she had been 
called upon to sing was so Avild and weird, a dead 
silence fell upon the room, and an influence as of 
terror pervaded the whole assembly. It was a song 
by Dessauer, which he had composed for her voice, 
the words by Tennyson. No one who was present 
that evening can forget how she broke the silence 
with 

" We were two (laughters of one race," 

or how she uttered the words, 

" The wind 19 roaring m turret and tree." 

It was like a scene in a great tragedy, and then I 
fully understood the worship she had won as be- 
longing only to those consummate artists who have 
arisen to dignify and ennoble the lyric stage. As 
wc left the house Procter said, " You are in great 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 59 

luck to-uight. I never heard lier sing more di- 
vinely." 

The Poet frequently spoke to me of the old days 
when he was contributing to the "London Maga- 
zine," which iifty years ago was deservedly so pop- 
ular in Great Britain. All the " best talent " (to 
use a modern advertisement phrase) wrote for it. 
Carlyle sent his papers on Schiller to be printed 
in it ; De Quincey's " Confessions of an English 
Opium-Eater " appeared in its pages ; and the es- 
says of " Elia " came out first in that potent period- 
ical ; Landor, Keats, and John Bovvring contrib- 
uted to it ; and to have printed a prose or poetical 
article in the " London " entitled a man to be asked 
to dine out anywhere in society in those days. In 
1821 the proprietors began to give dinners in 
Waterloo Place once a month to their contribu- 
tors, who, after the cloth was removed, were ex- 
pected to talk over the prospects of the magazine, 
and lay out the contents for next month. Proc- 
ter described to me the authors of his generation 
as they sat round the old "mahogany-tree" of 
that period. "Very social and expansive hours 
they passed in that pleasant room half a century 
ago. Thither came stalwart Allan Cunningham, 
with his Scotch face shining with good-nature ; 
Charles Lamb, ' a Diogenes with the heart of a 
St. John ' ; Hamilton Reynolds, whose good temper 
and vivacity were like condiments at a feast ; John 



()0 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

Clare, the peasant -poet, simple as a daisy ; Tom 
Hood, young, silent, and grave, but who neverthe- 
less now and then shot out a pun that damaged 
the shaking sides of the whole company ; De Quin- 
cey, self-involved and courteous, rolling out his 
periods with a pomp and splendor suited, perhaps, 
to a high Roman festival ; and with these sons of 
fame gathered certain flameless folk whose con- 
tributions to the great ' London ' are now under 
the protection of that tremendous power which men 
call Oljlioio7i." 

It was a vivid pleasure to hear Procter describe 
Edward Irving, the eccentric preacher, who made 
such a deep impression on the spirit of his time. 
He is now dislimned into space, but he was, ac- 
cording to all his thoughtful contemporaries, a 
"son of thunder," a "giant force of activity." 
Procter fully indorsed all that Carlyle has so nobly 
wi-itten of the eloquent man who, dying at forty- 
two, has stamped his strong personal vitality on 
the age in which he lived. 

Procter, in his younger days, was evidently much 
impressed by that clever rascal who, under the 
name of "Janus Weathercock," scintillated at 
intervals in the old " London Magazine." Wain- 
wright — for that was his real name — was so brill- 
iant, he made friends for a time among many of the 
first-class contributors to that once famous periodi- 
cal ; but the Ten Commandments ruined all his 



OLD ACQUAIXTANCE. 61 

prospects lor life. A murderer, a Ibrger, a thief, 
— ill short, a sinner in general, — he came to 
grief rather early in his wicked career, and suffered 
penalties of the law accordingly, but never to the 
full extent of his remarkable deserts. I have 
heard Procter describe his personal appearance as 
he came sparkling into the room, clad in undress 
military costume. His smart conversation deceived 
those about him into the belief that he had been an 
officer in the dragoons, that he had spent a large 
fortune, and now condescended to take a part in 
periodical literature with the culture of a gentleman 
and the grace ol an amateur. How this vapid 
charlatan in a braided surtout and prismatic neck- 
tie could so long veil his real character from, and 
retain the regard of, such men as Procter and Tal- 
fourd and Coleridge is amazing. Lamb calls him 
the "kind and light-hearted Janus," and thought 
he liked him. The contributors often spoke of his 
guileless nature at the festal monthly board of the 
magazine, and no one dreamed that this gay and 
mock-smiling London cavalier was about to begin 
a career so foul and monstrous that the annals of 
crime for centuries have no blacker pages inscribed 
on them. To secure the means of luxurious liv- 
ing without labor, and to pamper his dandy tastes, 
this lounging, lazy litterateur resolved to become a 
murderer on a large scale, and accompany his cruel 
poisonings with forgeries whenever they were most 



62 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

convenient. His custom for years was to effect 
policies of insurance on the lives of his relations, 
and then at the proper time administer strychnine 
to his victims. The heart sickens at the recital of 
his brutal crimes. On the life of a beautiful young 
girl named Abercrombie this fiendish wretch effect- 
ed an insurance at various offices for £ 18,000 be- 
fore he sent her to her account with the rest of his 
poisoned too-confiding relatives. So many heavily 
insured ladies dying in violent convulsions drew 
attention to the gentleman who always called to 
collect the money. But why this consummate 
criminal was not brought to justice and hung, my 
Lord Abinger never satisfactorily divulged. At 
last this polished Sybarite, who boasted that he al- 
ways drank the richest Montepulciano, who could 
not sit long in a room that was not garlanded with 
flowers, who said he felt lonely in an apartment 
without a fine cast of the Venus de' Medici in it, — 
this self-indulgent voluptuary at last committed 
several forgt lies on the Bank of England, and the 
Old Bailey sessions of July, 1837, sentenced him to 
transportation for life. While he was lying in 
Newgate prior to his departure, with other con- 
victs, to New South Wales, where he died, Dickens 
went with a former acquaintance of the prisoner to 
see him. They found him still possessed with a 
morbid self-esteem and a poor and empty vanity. 
All other feelings and interests were overwhelmed 



OLD ACQUAINTAXCE. 65 

hy an excessive idolatry of self, and he claimed (I 
now quote his own words to Dickens) a soul whose 
nutriment is love, and its offspring art, nuisic, di- 
vine song, and still holier philosophy. To the last 
this super-refined creature seemed undisturbed by 
remorse. What place can we fancy for such a rep- 
tile, and what do we learn from such a career? 
Talfburd has so wisely summed up the Avhole case 
for us that I leave the dark tragedy with the re- 
cital of this solemn sentence from a paper on the 
culprit in the " Final Memorials of Charles Lamb " : 
" Wainwright's vanity, nurtured by selfishness and 
unchecked by religion, became a disease, amounting 
perhaps to monomania, and yielding one 1 ssou to 
repay the world for his existence, viz. that there 
is no state of the soul so dangerous as that in which 
the vices of the sensualist are envenomed by the 
grovelling intellect of the scorner." 

One of the men best worth meeting in London, 
under any circumstances, was Leigh Hunt, but it 
was a special boon to find him and Procter to- 
gether. I remember a day in the summer of 1859 
when Procter had a party of friends at dinner to 
meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to 
London. Among the guests were the Coimtess of 

, Kinglake, the author of " Eothen," Charles 

Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, 
the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even 
then perceptible in his manner. 



C6 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

Adelaide Procter did not reach Lome in season to 
begin the dinner with ns, but she came later in the 
evening, and sat for some time in earnest talk with 
Hawthorne. It was a " goodly com])anie," long to 
be remembered. Hunt and Procter were in a mood 
for gossip over the ruddy port. As the twilight 
deepened around the table, which was exquisitely 
decorated with flowers, the author of " Rimini " 
recalled to Procter's recollection other memorable 
tables where they used to meet in vanished days 
with Lamb, Coleridge, and others of their set long 
since passed away. As they talked on in rather 
low tones, I saw the two old poets take hands more 
than once at the mention of dead and beloved 
names. I recollect they had a good deal of fine 
talk over the great singers whose voices had de- 
lighted them in bygone days ; speaking with rap- 
ture of Pasta, whose tones in opera they thought 
incomparably the grandest musical utterances they 
had ever heard. Procter's tribute in verse to this 

" Queen and wonder of the enchanted world of sound " 

is one of his best lyrics, and never was singer more 
divinely complimented by poet. At the dinner I 
am describing he declared that she walked on the 
stage like an empress, " And when she sang," said 
he, " I held my breath." Leigh Hunt, in one of his 
letters to Procter in 1831, says : " As to Pasta, I 
love her, for she makes the ground firm under my 
feet, and the sky blue over my head." 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 67 

T cannot remember all the good things I heard 
that day, but some of them live in my recollection 
still. Hunt quoted Hartley Coleridge, who said, 
" No boy ever imagined himself a poet while he 
was reading Shakespeare or Milton." And speaking 
of Landor's oaths, he said, " They are so rich, they 
are really nutritious." Talking of criticism, he said 
he did not believe in spiteful imps, but in kindly 
elves who Avoiild "nod to him and do him courte- 
sies." He laughed at Bishop Berkely's attempt to 
destroy the world in one octavo volume. His doc- 
trine to mankind always was, " Enlarge your tastes, 
that you may enlarge your hearts." He believed in 
reversing original propensities by education, — as 
Spallanzani brought up eagles on bread and milk, 
and fed doves on raw meat. " Don't let us demand 
too much of human nature," was a line in his creed ; 
and he believed in Hood's advice, that gentleness in 
a case of wrong direction is always better than vitu- 
peration. 

" Mifl liprht, and by degrees, sliould he tlie plan 
To cure tlie dark and erring mind ; 
But who would rush at a heniglited man 
And give him two black eyes for being blind ? " 

I recollect there was much converse that day on 
the love of reading in old age, and Leigh Hunt ob- 
served that Sir Robert Walpole, seeing Mr. Fox 
busy in the library at Houghton, said to him : 
" And you can read ! Ah, how I envy you ! I to- 



68 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

fully neglected the habit of reading when I was 
young, and now in my old age I cannot read a 
single page." Hunt himself was a man who coidd 
be " penetrated by a book." It was inspiring to 
hear him dilate over " Plutarch's Morals," and 
quote passages from that delightful essay on "The 
Tranquillity of the Soul." He had such reverence 
for the wisdom folded up on his libi-ary shelves, he 
declared that the very perusal of the hacks of h'ls 
books yfa9> "a discipline of humanity." Whenever 
and wherever T met this charming person, 1 learned 
a lesson of gentleness and patience ; for, steeped to 
the lips in poverty as he was, he was ever the most 
cheerful, the most genial companion and friend. 
He never left his good-nature outside the family 
circle, as a Mussulman leaves his slippers outside a 
mosque, but he always brought a smiling face into 

the house with him. T— — A , whose fine 

floating wit has never yet quite condensed itself into 
a star, said one day of a Boston man that he was 
"east-wind made flesh." Leigh Hunt was exactly 
the opposite of this ; he was compact of all the 
spicy breezes that blow. In his bare cottage at 
Hammersmith the temperament of his fine spirit 
heaped up such riches of fancy that kings, if wise 
ones, might envy his magic power. 

" Onward in faitli, and leave the rest to Heaven," 

w^as a line he often quoted. There was about him 
.cuch a modest foi'titude in want and poverty, such 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 69 

an inborn mental superiority to low and uncomfort- 
able circumstances, that he rose without effort into 
a region encompassed with felicities, untroubled by 
a care or sorrow. He always reminded me of that 
favorite child of the genii who carried an amulet in 
his bosom by which all the gold and jewels of the 
Sultan's halls were no sooner beheld than they be- 
came his own. If he sat down companionless to a 
solitary chop, his imagination transformed it straight- 
way into a fine shoulder of mutton. "When he 
looked out of his dingy old windows on the four 
bleak elms in front of his dwelling, he saw, or 
thought he saw, a vast forest, and he could hear in 
the note of one poor sparrow even the silvery voices 
of a hundred nightingales. Such a man might 
often be cold and hungry, but he had the wit never 
to be aware of it. 

Hunt's love for Procter was deep and tender, and 
in one of his notes to me he says, referring to the 
meeting my memory has been trying to describe, " I 
have reasons for liking our dear friend Procter's 
wine beyond what you saw when we dined together 
at his table the other day." Procter prefixed a 
memoir of the life and writings of Ben Jonson to 
the great dramatist's works printed by Moxon in 
1838. I happen to be the lucky owner of a copy 
of this edition that once belonged to Leigh Hunt, 
who has enriched it and perfumed the pages, as it 
were, by his annotations. The memoir abounds in 



70 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

felicities of expression, and is the best brief chron- 
icle yet made of rare Ben and his poetry. Leigh 
Hunt has filled the margins with his own neat 
handwriting, and as I turn over the leaves, thus 
companioned, I seem to meet those two loving 
brothers in modern song, and have again the bene- 
fit of their sweet society, — a society redolent of 

" The love of learning, the sequestered nooks. 
And all the sweet serenity of books." 

I shall not soon forget the first morning I walked 
with Procter and Kenyon to the famous house No. 
22 St. James Place, overlooking the Green Park, 
to a break fast with Samuel Rogers. Mixed up with 
this matutinal rite was much that belongs to the 
modern literary and political history of England. 
Fox, Burke, Talleyrand, Grattan, Walter Scott, and 
many other great ones have sat there and held con- 
verse on divers matters with the banker-poet. For 
more than half a century the wits and the wise men- 
honored that unpretending mansion with their pres- 
ence. On my way thither for the first time my 
companions related anecdote after anecdote of the 
" aucient bard," as they called our host, telling me 
also how all his life long the poet of Memory had 
been giving substantial aid to poor authors ; how he 
had befriended Sheridan, and how good he had been 
to Campbell in his sorest needs. Intellectual or 
artistic excellence was a sure passport to his salon, 
and his door never turned on reluctant hinges to 



OLD ACQUAIXTAXCE. 73 

admit the unfriended man of letters who needed his 
aid and counsel. 

"We arrived in quite an expectant mood, to find 
our host already seated at the head of his table, and 
his good man Edmund standing behind his chair. 
As we entered the room, and I saw Rogers sitting 
there so venerable and strange, I was reminded of 
that line of "Wordsworth's, 

" The oldest man he seemed that ever wore gray hair." 

But old as he was, he seemed full of verve, vivacity, 
and decision. Knowing his homage for Ben Frank- 
lin, I had brought to him as a gift from America 
an old volume issued by the patriot printer in 1741. 
He was delighted with my little present, and began 
at once to say how much he thought of Franklin's 
prose. He considered the style admirable, and de- 
clared that it might be studied now for improvement 
in the art of composition. One of the guests that 
morning was the Rev. Alexander Dyce, the scholarly 
editor of Beaumont and Fletcher, and he very soon 
drew Rogers out on the subject of Warren Hast- 
ings's trial. It seemed ghostly enough to hear that 
famous event depicted by one who sat in the great 
hall of "William Rufus ; who day after day had 
looked on and listened to the eloquence of Fox 
and Sheridan ; who had heard Edmund Burke 
raise his voice till the old arches of Irish oak re- 
sounded, and impeach Warren Hastings, "in the 



74 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in 
the name of every rank, as the common enemy and 
oppressor of all." It thrilled me to hear Rogers 
say, "As I vvralked up Parliament Street with Mrs, 
Siddons, after hearing Sheridan's great speech, we 
both agreed that never before could human lips 
have uttered more eloquent words." That moniing 
Rogers described to us the appearance of Grattan as 
he first saw and heard him when he made his first 
speech in Parliament. " Some of us were inclined 
to laugh," said he, " at the orator's Irish brogue 
when he began his speech that day, but after he 
had been on his legs five minutes nobody dared to 
laugh any more." Then followed personal anec- 
dotes of Madame De Stael, the Duke of Wellington, 
Walter Scott, Tom Moore, and Sydney Smith, all 
exquisitely told. Both our host and his friend 
Procter had known or entertained most of the 
celebrities of their day. Procter soon led the 
conversation up to matters connected with the 
stage, and thinking of John Kemble and Edmund 
Kean, I ventured to ask Rogers who of all the 
great actors he had seen bore away the palm. 
" I have looked upon a magnificent procession of 
them," he said, " in my time, and I never saw 
any one superior to David Garrick!' He then 
repeated Hannah Morc's couplet on receiving as 
a gift from Mrs. Garrick the shoe-buckles which 
once belonged to the great actor : — 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 75 

" Tliy buckles, Ganick, another may use, 
But none shall be found who can tread in thy shoes." 

"We applauded his memory and his manner of i*ecit- 
ing the lines, which seemed to please him. " How 
much can sometimes be put into an epigram ! " he 
said to Procter, and asked him if he remembered 
the lines about Earl Grey aud the Kaffir war. 
Procter did not recall them, and Rogers set off 
again : — 

" A dispute has arisen of late at the Cape, 
As touching the devil, his color and shape ; 
While some folks contend that the devil is white, 
The others aver that he 's black as midnight ; 
But now 't is decided quite right in this way, 
And all are convinced that the devil is Grey." 

We asked him if he remembered the theatrical 
excitement in London when Garrick and his trouble- 
some contemporary, Barry, were playing King Lear 
at rival houses, and dividing the final opinion of the 
critics. " Yes," said he, " perfectly. T saw both 
those wonderful actors, and fully agreed at the time 
with the admirable epigram that ran like wildfire 
into every nook and corner of society." " Did the 
epigram still live in his memory ? " we asked. The 
old man seemed looking across the misty valley of 
time for a few moments, and then gave it without a 
pause : — 

" The town have chosen different ways 

To praise their different Lears ; 
To Barry they give loud applause. 

To Garrick only tears." 



76 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

" A king ! ay, every inch a king, 
Snrli Barry dotli appear ; 
But Garrick 's quite another thing, — 

He 's every inch King Lear ! " 

• 

Among other things Avhich Rogers told us that 
morning, I remember he had much to say of 
Byron's forgetfulness as to all manner of things. 
As an evidence of his inaccuracy, Rogers related 
how the noble bard had once quoted to him some 
lines on Venice as Southey's " which he wanted me 
to admire," said Rogers ; " and as I wrote them 
myself, I had no hesitation in doing so. The lines 
are in my poem on Italy, and begin, 

" 'There is a glorious city in the sea.' " 

Samuel Lawrence had recently painted in oils a 
portrait of Rogers, and we asked to see it ; so Ed- 
mund was sent up stairs to get it, and bring it to 
the table. Rogers himself wished to compare it 
with his own face, and had a looking-glass held 
before him. "VVe sat by in silence as he regarded 
the picture attentively, and Avaited for his criticism. 

Soon he burst out with, " Is my nose so d y 

sharp as th.it?" We all exclaimed, "No! no! 
the artist is at fault there, sir." " I thought so," 
he cried; "he has painted the face of a dead man, 
d — n him ! " Some one said, " The portrait is too 
hard." "I won't be painted as a hard man," re- 
joined Rogers. " I am not a hard man, am I, 
Procter? " asked the old poet. Procter deprecated 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 77 

with energy such an idea as that. Looking at 
the portrait atrain, Rogers said, with <rreat feeling, 
" Children would run away from that fare, and they 
never ran away from me ! " Notwithstanding all 
he had to say against the portrait, I thought it a 
wonderful likeness, and a painting of great value. 
Moxon, the publisher, who was present, asked for a 
certain portfolio of engraved heads which had been 
made from time to time of Rogers, and this was 
brought and opened for our examination of its con- 
tents. Rogers insisted upon looking over the por- 
traits, and he amiiscd us by his cutting comments 
on each one as it came out of the portfolio. 
" This," said he, holding one up, " is the head 
of a cunning fellow, and this the face of a de- 
bauched clergyman, and this the visage of a shame- 
less drunkard ! " After a comic discussion of the 
pictures of himself, which went on for half an hour, 
he said, " It is time to change the topic, and set 
aside the little man for a very great one. Bring 
me my collection of Washington portraits." These 
were brought in, and he had much to say of Ameri- 
can matters. He remembered being told, when a 
boy, by his father one day, that " a fight had recently 
occurred at a place called Bunker Hill, in America." 
He then inquired about Webster and the monument. 
He had met Webster in England, and greatly ad- 
mired him. Now and then his memory was at fault, 
and he spoke occasionally of events as still exist- 



78 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

ing which had happened half a century before. I 
remember what a shock it gave me when he asiced 
me if Alexander Hamilton had printed any new 
pamphlets lately, and begged me to send him any- 
thing that distinguished man might publish after I 
got home to America. 

I recollect how delighted I was when Rogers 
sent me an invitation the second time to breakfast 
with him. On that occasion the poet spoke of be- 
ing in Paris on a pleasure-tour with Daniel Web- 
ster, and he grew eloquent over the great American 
orator's genius. He also referred with enthusiasm 
to Bryant's poetry, and quoted with deep feeling 
the first three verses of " The Future Life." When 
he pronounced the lines : — 

" My name on earth was ever in tliy prayer, 
And must thou never utter it in lieaven ? " 

his voice trembled, and he faltered out, " I cannot 
go on : there is something in that poem which 
breaks me down, and I must never ti'y again to re- 
cite verses so full of tenderness and imdying love," 

For Longfellow's poems, then just published in 
England, he expressed the warmest admiration, and 
thought the author of " Voices of the Night " one 
of the most perfect artists in English verse who had 
ever lived. 

Rogers's reminiscences of Holland House that 
morning were a series of delightful pictures painted 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 79 

by an artist who left out none of the salient fea- 
tures, but gave to everything he touched a graphic 
reality. In his narrations the eloquent men, the 
fine ladies, he had seen there assembled again around 
their noble host and hostess, and one listened in the 
pleasant breakfast-room in St. James Place to the 
wit and wisdom of that brilliant comjiany which 
met fifty years ago in the great salon of that princely 
mansion, which will always be famous in the literaiy 
and political history of England. 

Rogers talked that morning with inimitable 
finish and grace of expression. A light seemed to 
play over his faded features when he recalled some 
happy past experience, and his eye would sometimes 
fill as he glanced back among his kindred, all now 
dead save one, his sister, who also lived to a great 
age. His head was very fine, and I never could 
quite nnderstand the satirical sayings about his per- 
sonal appearance which have crept into the literary 
gossip of his time. He was by no means the viva- 
cious spectre some of his contemporaries have rep- 
resented him, and I never thought of connecting him 
with that terrible line in " The Mirror of Magis- 
trates," — 

"His withered fist still striking at Death's door." 

His dome of brain was one of the amplest and most 
perfectly shaped I ever saw, and his countenance 
was very far from unpleasant. His faculties to en- 



80 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

joy had not perished with age. He certainly looked 
like a well-seasoned author, hut not dropping to 
pieces yet. His turn of thought was characteristic, 
and in the main just, for he loved the best, and was 
naturally impatient of what Avas low and mean in 
conduct and intellect. He had always lived in an 
atmosphere of art, and his reminiscences of paint- 
ers and sculptors were never wearisome or dull. He 
had a store of pleasant anecdotes of Chantrey, whom 
he had employed as a wood-carver long before he 
became a modeller in clay ; and he had also much to 
tell us of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose lectures he 
had attended, and whose studio -talk had been fa- 
miliar to him while he was a young man and study- 
ing art himself as an amateur. It was impossible 
almost to make Rogers seem a real being as we used 
to surround his table during those mornings and 
sometimes deep into the afternoons. We were lis- 
tening to one who had talked with Boswell about 
Dr. Johnson ; who had sat hours with Mrs. Piozzi ; 
who read the " Vicar of Wakefield " the day it was 
published ; who had heard Haydn, the composer, 
playing at a concert, " dressed out with a sword " ; 
who had listened to Talleyrand's best sayings from 
his own lips ; who had seen John Wesley lying 
dead in his coffin, " an old man, with the counte- 
nance of a little child " ; who had been with Beck- 
ford at Fonthill ; who had seen Porson slink back 
into the dining-room after the company had left 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 81 

it and drain what was left in the wineglasses ; who 
had crossed the Apennines with Byron ; who had 
seen Beau Nash in the height of his career dancing 
minuets at Bath ; who had known Lady Hamilton 
in her davs of beauty, and seen her often with Lord 
Nelson ; who was in Fox s room when that great 
man lay dying ; and who could describe Pitt from 
personal observation, speaking always as if his 
mouth was " full of worsted." It was unreal as a 
dream to sit there in St. James Place and hear that 
old man talk by the hour of what one had been 
reading about all one 's life. One thing, I must 
confess, somewhat shocked me, — I was not pre- 
pared for the feeble manner in which some of Rog- 
ers's best stories were received by the gentlemen 
who had gathered at his table on those Tuesday 
mornings. But when Procter told me in explana- 
tion afterward that they had all " heard the same 
anecdotes every week, perhaps, for half a century 
from the same lips," I no longer wondered at the 
seeming apathy I had witnessed. It was a great 
treat to me, however, the talk I heard at Rogers's 
hospitable table, and my three visits there cannot 
be erased from the pleasantest tablets of memor3^ 
There is only one regret connected with them, but 
that loss still haunts me. On one of those memo- 
rable mornings I was obliged to leave earlier than 
the rest of the company on account of an engage- 
ment out of London, and Lady Beecher (formerly 



82 OLD A C Q U A I NT A N C E . 

INliss 0"Neil), the great actress of other days, came 
in and read an hour to the old poet and his guests. 
Procter told me afterward that among other things 
she read, at Rogers's request, the 14th chapter of 
Isaiah, and that her voice and manner seemed like 
inspiration. 

Seeing and talking with Rogers was, indeed, like 
living in the past : and one may imagine how weird 
it seemed to a raw Yankee youth, thus facing the 
man who might have shaken hands with Dr. John- 
son. I ventured to ask him one day if he had 
ever seen the doctor. " No," said he, "but I went 
down to Bolt Court in 1782 with the intention of 
making Dr. Johnson's acquaintance. I raised the 
knocker tremblingly, and hearing the shuffling foot- 
steps as of an old man in the entry, my heart failed 
me, and I put down the knocker softly again, and 
crept back into Fleet Street without seeing the 
vision I was not bold enough to encounter." I 
thought it was something to have heard the foot- 
steps of old Sam Johnson stirring about in that 
ancient entry, and for my own part I was glad to 
look upon the man whose eai"s had been so strangely 
privileged. 

Rogers drew about him all the musical as well as 
the literary talent of London. Grisi and Jenny I.ind 
often came of a morning to sing their best arias to 
him when he became too old to attend the opera ; 
and both Adelaide and Fanny Kemble brought to 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 85 

him frequently the rich tributes of their genius in 
art. 

It was my good fortune, through the friendship 
of Procter, to make the acquaintance, at Rogers's 
table, of Leslie, the artist, — a warm friend of the 
old poet, — and to be taken round by him and shown 
all the principal private galleries, in London. He 
first drew my attention to the pictures by Con- 
stable, and pointed out their quiet beauty to my un- 
educated eye, thus instructing me to hate all those 
intemperate landscapes and lurid compositions which 
aljound in the shambles of modern art. In the 
company of Leslie I saw my first Titians and Van- 
dycks, and felt, as Northcote says, on my good be- 
havior in the presence of portraits so lifelike and 
inspiring. It was Leslie who inoculated me with 
a love of Gainsborough, before whose perfect pic- 
tures a spectator involuntarily raises his hat and 
stands uncovered. (And just here let me advise 
every art lover who goes to England to visit the 
little Dulwich Gallery, only a fcAv miles from Lon- 
don, and there to spend an hour or two among 
the exquisite Gainsboroughs. No small collection 
in Europe is better worth a visit, and the place 
itself in summer-time is enchanting with greenery.) 

As Rogers's dining-room abounded in only first- 
rate works of art, Leslie used to take round the 
guests and make us admire the Raphaels and Cor- 
reggios. Inserted in the walls on each side of the 



86 OLD ACQUAIXTAXCE. 

mantel-piece, like tiles, were several of Turner's 
original oil and water-color drawings, which that 
supreme artist had designed to illustrate Rogers's 
" Poems " and " Italy." Long before Ruskin made 
those sketches world-famous in his " Modern Paint- 
ers," I have heard Leslie point out their beauties 
with as fine an enthusiasm. He used to say that 
they purified the whole atmosphere round St. James 
Place ! 

Procter had a genuine regard for Count d'Orsay, 
and he pointed him out to me one day sitting in 
the window of his club, near Gore House, looking 
out on Piccadilly. The count seemed a little past 
his prime, but was still the handsomest man in 
London. Procter described him as a brilliant per- 
son, of special ability, and by no means a mer' 
dandy. 

I first saw Procter's friend, John Forster, the bi- 
ographer of Goldsmith and Dickens, in his pleasant 
rooms. No. 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was then 
in his prime, and looked brimful of energy. His age 
might have been forty, or a trifle onward from that 
mile-stone, and his whole manner announced a de- 
termination to assert that nobody need prompt him. 
His voice rang loud and clear, up stairs and down, 
everywhere throughout his premises. When he 
walked over the uncarpeted floor, you heard him 
walk, and he meant you should. When he spoke, 
nobody required an ear-trumpet ; the deaf never 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 



89 



lost a syllable of his manly utterances. Procter 
and he were in the same Commission, and were on 
excellent terms, the younger officer always regarding 
the elder with a kind of leonine deference. 

It was to John Forster these charming lines were 
addressed by Barry Cornwall, when the poet sent 
his old friend a present of Shakespeare's Works. A 
more exquisite compliment was never conveyed in 
verse so modest and so perfect in simple grace : — 

" I do not know a man who better reads 
Or weighs the great thoughts of the book I send, — 
Better than he whom 1 have called my friend 
For twenty years and upwards. He who feeds 
Upon Shaicesperian pastures never needs 
The humbler food which springs from plains below ; 
Yet may he love the little flowers that blow, 
And him excuse who for their beauty pleads. 

" Take then my Shakespeare to some sylvan nook ; 
And pray thee, in the name of Days of old. 
Good-will aud friendship, never bought or sold. 
Give me assurance thou wilt always look 
With kindness still on Spirits of humbler mould ; 
Kept firm by resting on that wondrous book. 
Wherein the Dream of Life is all unrolled." 

Forster's library was filled with treasures, and he 
brought to the dinner-table, the day I was first with 
him, such rare and costly manuscripts and annotated 
volumes to show us, that one's appetite for " made 
dishes " was quite taken away. The excellent lady 
whom he afterward married was one of the guests, 



90 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

and among the gentlemen present I remember the 
brilliant author of " The Bachelor of the Albany," a 
book that was then the Novel sensation in London. 
Forster flew from one topic to another with admi- 
rable skill, and entertained us with anecdotes of 
WeUington and Rogers, gilding the time with capi- 
tal imitations of his celebrated contemporaries in 
literature and on the stage. A touch about Ed- 
mund Kean made us all start from our chairs and 
demand a mimetic repetition. Forster must have 
been an excellent private actor, for he had power 
and skill quite exceptional in that way. His force 
carried him along wherever he chose to go, and 
when he played " Kitely," his ability must have 
been strikingly apparent. After his marriage, and 
when he removed from Lincoln's Lm to his fine 
residence at " Palace-Gate House," he gave fre- 
quent readings, evincing remarkable natural and ac- 
quired talents. For Dickens he had a love amount- 
ing to jealousy. He never quite relished anybody 
else whom the great novelist had a fondness for, 
and I have heard droll stories touching this weak- 
ness. For Professor Felton he had unbounded re- 
gard, which had grown up by correspondence and 
through report from Dickens. He had never met 
Felton, and when the professor arrived in London, 
Dickens, with his love of fun, arranged a bit of 
cajolery^ which was never quite forgotten, though 
wholly forgiven. Knowing how highly Forster 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 91 

esteemed Feltoii, through his writings and his 
letters, Dickens resolved to take Feltou at once to 
Eorster's house and introduce him as Professor 
Stowe, the port of both these gentlemen being 
pretty nearly equal. The Stowes were then in 
England on their triumphant tour, and this made 
the attempt at deception an easy one. So, Felton 
being in the secret, he and Dickens proceed to 
Forster's house and are shown in. Down comes 
Forster into the library, and is presented forthwith 
to ''Professor Stowe" "Uncle Tom's Cabin" 
is at once referred to, and the talk goes on in 
that direction for some time. At last both Dick- 
ens and Felton fell into such a paroxysm of laughter 
at Forster's dogged determination to be compli- 
mentary to the world-renowned novel, that they 
could no longer hold out ; and Forster, becoming 
almost insane with wonder at the hilarious eon- 
duct of his two visitors, Dickens revealed their 
wickedness, and a right jolly day the happy trio 
made of it. 

Talfourd informs us that Forster had become to 
Charles Lamb as one of his oldest campanions, and 
that Mary also cherished a strong regard for him. 
It is surely a proof of his admirable qualities that 
the love of' so many of England's best and greatest 
was secured to him by so lasting a tenure. To have 
the friendship of Landor, Dickens, and Procter 
through long years ; to have Carlyle for a constant 



92 OLD ACQUAINTAXCE. 

votary, and to be mourned by him with an abiding 
sorrow, — these are no slight tributes to purity of 
purpose. 

Forster had that genuine sympathy with men of 
letters which entitled him to be their biographer, 
and all his works in that department have a spe- 
cial charm, habitually gained only by a subtle and 
earnest intellect. 

It is a singular coincidence that the writers of 
two of the most brilliant records of travel of their 
time should have been law students in Barry Corn- 
wall's office. Kingiake, the author of "Eothen," 
and Warburton, the author of " The Crescent and 
the Cross," were at one period both engaged as 
pupils in their profession under the guidance of 
Mr. Procter. He frequently spoke with pride of 
his two law students, and when Warburton per- 
ished at sea, his grief for his brilliant friend was 
deep and abiding. Kinglake's later literary fame 
was always a pleasure to the historian's old master, 
and no one in England loved better to point out 
the fine passages in the " History of the Invasion 
of the Crimea " than the old poet in Weymouth 
Street. 

"Blackwood" and the "Quarterly Review" 
railed at Procter and his author friends for a long 
period ; but how true is the saying of Macaulay, 
" that the place of books in the public estimation 
is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 95 

what is written in them ! " No man was more 
decried in his day than Procter's friend, William 
Hazlitt. The poet had lor the critic a genuine 
admiration ; and I have heard him dilate with a 
kind of rapture over the critic's fine sayings, quot- 
ing abundant passages from the essays. Procter 
would never hear any disparagement of his friend's 
ability and keenness. I recall his earnest but re- 
strained indignation one day, when some person 
compared Hazlitt with a dilfusive modern writer of 
notes on the theatre, and I remember with what 
contempt, in his sweet forgivable way, the old man 
spoke of much that passes nowadays for criticism. 
He said Hazlitt was exactly the opposite of Lord 
Chesterfield, who advised his son, if he could not 
•et at a thing in a straight line to try the ser- 
pentine one. There were no crooked pathways in 
Hazlitt's intellect. His style is brilliant, but never 
cloyed with ornamentation. Hazlitt's paper on 
Gifford was thought by Procter to be as pungent a 
bit of writing as had appeared in his day, and he 
quoted this paragraph as a sample of its biting jus- 
tice : " Mr. Giff"ord is admirably qualified for the 
situation he has held for many years as editor of 
the ' Quarterly ' by a happy combination of de- 
fects, natural and acquired." In one of his letters 
to me Procter writes, " I despair of the age that 
has forgotten to read Hazlitt." 

Procter was a delightful prose writer, as well as 



96 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 



a charming poet. Having met in old magazines 
and annnals several of his essays and stories, and 
admiring their style and spirit, I induced him, 'after 
much persuasion, to collect and publish in America 
his prose works. The result was a couple of vol- 
umes, which were brought out in Boston in 1853. 
In them there are perhaps no "thoughts that 
wander through eternity," but they abound in fan- 
cies which the reader will recognize as agile 

" Daughters of the earth and sun." 

In them there is nothing loud or painful, and who- 
ever reaUy loves "a good book," and knows it to be 
such on trial, will find Barry Cornwall's "Essays and 
Tales in Prose " most delectable reading. " Impara- 
dised," as Milton hath the word, on a summer hill- 
side, or tented by the cool salt wave, no better after- 
noon literature can be selected. One will never 
meet with distorted metaphor or tawdry rhetoric in 
Barry's thoughtful pages, but will find a calm 
philosophy and a beautiful faith, very precious and 
profitable in these days of doubt and insecurity of 
intellect. There is a respite and a sympathy in this 
fine spirit, and so I commend him heartily in times 
so full of turmoil and suspicion as these. One of 
the stories in the fii-st volume of these prose writ- 
ings, called " The Man-Hunter," is quite equal in 
power to any of the graphic pieces of a similar 
character ever written by De Quincey or Dickens, 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 97 

but the tone in these books is commonly more 
tender and inclining to melancholy. What, for 
instance, could be more heart-moving than these 
passages of his on the death of little children ? 

" I scarcely know how it is, but the deaths of children 
seem to me always less premature than those of elder per- 
sons. Kot tliat they are in fact so; but it is l)ecause they 
tliemselves have little or no relation to time or maturity. 
Life seems a race which they have yet to run entirely. They 
have made no progress toward the goal. They are born — 
nothing further. But it seems hard, when a man has toiled 
high up the steep hill of knowledge, that he should be cast 
like Sisyphus, downward in a moment; that he who has 
worn the day and wasted the night in gathering the gold of 
science should be, M-ith all his wealth of learning, all his 
accumulations, made bankrupt at once. What becomes of 
all the riches of the soul, the piles and pyramids of precious 
thoughts which men heap together? Where are Shake- 
speare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream ? 
Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletch- 
er, and Milton's thought severe ? Methinks such things 
should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centu- 
ries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years ! 
I am content to believe that the mind of man survives 
(somewhere or other) his clay. 

" I was once present at the death of a little child. I will 
not pain the reader by portraying its agonies ; but wlien its 
breath was gone, its life, (nothing more tlian a cloud of 
smoke!) and it lay like a waxen image before me, I turned 
my eyes to its moaning mother, and sighed out my few 
M'ords of comfort. But I am a beggar in grief. 1 can feel 
and sigh and look kindly, I think ; but I have nothing to 
give. My tongue deserts me. I know the inutility of too 
soon comforting. I know that / should weep were I the 
loser, and I let the tears have their way. Sometimes a 



98 OLD ACQUAINTAXCE. 

word or two I can muster: a ' Sigli no more ! ' and 'Dear 
lady, do not grieve ! ' but further 1 am mute and useless." 

I have many letters and kind little notes which 
Procter used to write ine during the years I knew 
him best. His tricksy fancies peeped out in his 
correspondence, and several of his old friends in 
England thought no literary man of his time had a 
better epistolary style. His neat and elegant chi- 
rography on the back of a letter Avas always a delight- 
ful foretaste of something good inside, and I never 
received one of his welcome missives that did not 
contain, no matter how brief it happened to be, 
welcome passages of wit or affectionate interest. 

In one of his early letters to me he says : — • 

" There is no one rising hereabouts in literature. I sup- 
pose our national genius is taking a mechanical turn. And, 
in truth, it is much better to make a good steam-engine 
than to manufacture a had poem. ' Building the lofty 
rhyme ' is a good thing, hut our present buildings are of a 
low order, and seldom reach the Attic. This piece of wit 
will scarcely throw you into a fit, I imagine, your risible 
muscles being doubtless kept in good order." 

In another he writes : — 

"I see you have some capital names in the 'Atlantic 
Monthly.' If they will only put forth tlieir strength, there 
is no doubt as to the result, but the misfortune is that per- 
sons who write anonymously don't put forth their strength, 
in general. I was a magazine writer for no less than a 
dozen years, and I felt that no personal credit or responsi- 
bility attached to my literary trifling, and although I some- 
times did pretty well (for me), yet I never did my best." 



OLD ACQUAINTAXCE. 99 

As I read over again the portfolio of his letters 
to me, bearing date from 1848 to 1866, I find many 
passages of interest, but most of them are too per- 
sonal for type. A few extracts, however, I cannot 
resist copying. Some of his epistles are enriched 
with a song or a sonnet, then just written, and 
there are also frequent references in them to Amei'- 
ican editions of his poetical and prose works, which 
he collected at the request of his Boston publishers. 

In June, 1851, he writes : — 

"I have encountered a good many of yoiu* countrymen 
here lately, but have been introduced only to a few. I 
found Mr. Norton, who has returned to }"ou, and Mr. 
Dwisrht, M-ho is still here, I believe, very intelligent and 
agreeable. 

"If all Americans were like them and yourself, and if all 
Englishmen were like Kenyon and (so far as regards a 
desire to judge fairly) myself, I think there would be little 
or no quarrelling between our small island and your great 
continent. 

" Our glass palace is a perpetual theme for small-talk. It 
usurps the place of the weather, which is turned adrift, or 
laid up in ordmary for future use. jVevertheless it (I mean 
the palace) is a remarkable achievement, after all ; and 
I speak sincerely when I say, 'AH honor and glory to 
Paxton ! ' If the strings of my poor little lyre were not 
rusty and overworn, I think I should try to sing some of my 
nonsense verses before his image, and add to the idolatry 
already existing. 

" If you have hotter weather in America than that which 
is at present burning and blistering us here, you are en- 
titled to pity. If it continue much longer, I shall be held in 
solution for the remainder of my days, and shall be remark- 



100 OLD ACQUAIXTANCE. 

able as ' 0.vyg:en, tlie poet ' (reduced to his natural weakness 
and simplicity 1)y the hot sumiuer of 1851), instead of 
" Your very sincere and ol)lig;ed 

" B. W. Procter." 

Here is a hrief referenee to JiTild's remarkable 
novel, forming part of a note written to me iu 
1852: — 

"Tlianks for 'Marnrarct' (tlie book, not the woman"), that 
you have sent me. "When will you want it back? and wlio 
is the author ? There is a £:reat deal of clever writiny; in 
it, — great observation of nature, and also of character 
among a certain class of persons. But it is almost too mi- 
nute, and for me decidedly too theological. You see what 
irreligious people we are here. I shall come over to one of 
your camp-meetings and try to be converted. What will 
tliey administer in such a case? brimstone or brandy ? I 
shall try the latter first." 

Here is a letter bearing date "Thm-sday nighf, 
November 25, 1852," in which he refers to his 
own writings, and copies a charming song : — 

" Your letter, announcing the arrival of the little preface, 
reached me last night. I shall look out for the book in about 
three weeks hence, as you tell me that they are all jirint- 
ed. Y'ou Americans are a rapid race. When 1 thought you 
■were in Scotland, lo, you liad touched (he soil of Boston ; 
and when 1 thought you were unpacking my poor MS., 
tumbling it out of your great trunk, behold ! it is arranged — 
it is in the printer's hands — it is printed — published — it 
is — ah ! would 1 could add, SOLD 1 That, after all, is the 
gi-and triumph in Boston as well as London. 

"Well, since it is not sold yet, let us I)e generous and 
give a few copies away. Indeed, such is my weakness, that 
1 would sometimes rather gi\e than sell. In the present 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 101 

instance you will do me tlie kindness to send a ropy each to 
Mr. Charles Sumner, Mr. Hillard, Mr. Norton: but no — my 
wife requests to he the donor to Mr. Aoilon, so you must, 
if you please, write his name in the first leaf and state that 
it comes from ' Mrs. Procter.' I liked him very much when 
I met him in London, and I should wish him to be reminded 
of his English acquaintance. 

" I am writing to you at eleven o'clock at night, after a 
long and l)usy day, and I write non) rather than wait for a 
little inspiration, because the mail, I believe, starts to-mor- 
row. The unwilling Minerva is at my elbow, and 1 feel 
that every sentence I write, were it pounded ten times in 
a mortar, would come out again unleavened and hea^y. 
Braying some people in a mortar, you know, is but a weary 
and unprofitable process. 

" You speak of London as a delightful place. I don't 
know how it may be in the white-l)ait season, but at present 
it is foggy, rainy, cold, dull. Half of us are unwell and the 
other half dissatisfied. Some are apprehensive of an invasion, 
— not an impossible e^■ent ; some writing odes to the Duke of 
Wellington ; and I am putting my good friend to sleep with 
the flattest prose that ever dropped from an Englisli pen. 
I wish that it were better; 1 wish that it were e\en worse; 
but it IS the most undeniable twaddle. I must go to l)ed, 
and invoke the Muses in the morning. At present, I can- 
not touch one of their petticoats. 

"A SLEEP.Y SONG. 
" Sing ! sing me to sleep ! 

With gentle words, in some sweet slumberous measure, 
Such as lone poet on some shady steep 
Sings to the silence in his noonday leisure. 

" Sing ! as the river sings, 

When gently it flow^ between soft banks of flowers. 
And the bee murmurs, and the cuckoo brings 
His faint May music, 'tween the golden showers. 



102 OLD ACQUAINTAXCE. 

" Sing ! divinest tone ! 

1 sink beneath some wizard's charming wand ; 
I yield, I move, by soothing breezes blown, 
O'er twilight shores, into the Dreaming Land! 

" I read the above to you when you were in London. It 
will appear in an Annual edited by Miss Power (Lady liless- 
ington's niece). 

" Friday Morning. 

" The Avind blowing down the chimney ; the rain sprink- 
ling my windows. The English Apollo hides his head — 
you can scarcely see him on the ' misty mountain-tops ' 
(those brick ones which you remember in Portland Place;. 

" My friend Thackeray is gone to America, and I hope is, 
hy this time, in the United States. He goes to New York, 
and afterward I suppose (but I don't know) to Boston and 
Philadelphia. Have you seen Esmond ^ There are parts of 
it charmingly written. His pathos is to me very touching. 
I believe that the best mode of making one's way to a per- 
son's head is — -through his heart. 

" I hope that your literary men will like some of my little 
prose matters. I know that they will try to like them ; but 
the papers have been written so long, and all, or almost all, 
written so hastily, that 1 have my misgivings. However, 
they must take their chance. 

" Had I leisure to complete something that I began two 
or three years ;igo, and in which I have written a chapter or 
two, I should reckon more surely ou success ; but I shall 
prol)ably never finish the thing, although I contemplated 
only one volume. 

" (If you cannot read this letter apply to the printer's 
devil. — Hibernicus.) 

"Farewell. All good be with you. My wife desires to 
be kindly rememl)ered by you. 

" Always yours, very sincerely, 

" B. W. Procter. 

" P. S. — Can you contrive to send Mr. Willis a copy of 
the prose book? If so, pray do." 



OLD ACQUAIJSTTANCE. 103 

In February, 1853, he writes: — 

" Those famous volumes, the advent of which was some 
time since announced by the great transatlantic trumpet, 
liave duly arrived. My wife is properly grateful for her 
copy, which, indeed, impresses both of us with respect for 
the American skill in binding. Neither too gay to be gaudy, 
nor too grave, so as to affect the theological, it hits that 
happy medium which a*rees with the tastes of most people 
and disgusts none. We should flatter ourselves that it is 
intended to represent the matter within, but that we are 
afraid of incurring the sin of vanity, and the indiscretion of 
taking appearances too much upon trust. We suspend our 
conjectures on this very interesting subject. The whole 
getting up of the book is excellent. 

" For the little scraps of (critical) sugar enclosed in your 
letter, due thanks. These will sweeten our imagination for 
some time to come. 

" I have been obliged to give all the copies you sent me 
away. I dare say you will not grudge me four or tive copies 
more, to be sent at your convenience, of course. Let me 
liear from you at the same time. You can give me one of 
those frequent quarters of an hour which I know you now 
devote to a meditation on 'things in general.' 

" I am glad that you like Thackeray. He is well worth 
your liking. I trust to his making both friends and money 
in America, and to his keeping both. I am not so sure of 
the money, however, for he has a lil)eral hand. I should 
have liked to have been at one of the dinners you speak of. 
(When shall you begin that bridge ? You seem to be a long 
time about it. It will, I dare say, be a bridge of boats, 
after all.) .... 

" I was reading (rather re-reading) the other evening the 
introductory chapter to the ' Scarlet Letter.' It is admirably 
written. Kot having any great sympathy with a custom- 
house, — nor, indeed, with Salem,- except that it seems to be 
Hawthorne's birthplace, — all my attention was concen- 
trated on the style, Avhich seems to me excellent. 



104 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

"The most striking book which has been recently pub- 
lished liere is ' Villette,' l)y the authoress of ' Jane Eyre,' who, 
as you know, is a Miss Bronte. The book does not give one 
the most pleasing notion of the authoress, perhaps, but it is 
very clever, graphic, vigorous. It is ' man's meat,' and not 
the wliipped syllabub, which is all froth, without any jam at 
the bottom. The scene of the drama is Brussels. 

" I was sorry to hear of poor Willis. Our critics here 
were too severe upon him 

" The Frost King (vulg. Jack Frost) has come down upon 
us with all his might. Banished from the pleasant shores 
of Boston, he has come with his cold scythe and ice pincers 
to our undefended little island, and is tyrannizing in every 
corner and over every part of every person. Nothing is too 
great for him, nothing too mean. He condescends even to 
lay hold of the nose (an otfence for which any one below 
the dignity of a King — or a President — would be kicked). 
As for me, I have taken refuge in 

" A SONG, WITH A MORAL. 

" When the winter bloweth loud. 
And the earth is in a shroud. 
Frozen rain or sleety snow 
Dimming every dream below, — 
Til ere is e'er a spot of green 
Whence the heavens may be seen. 

" When our purse is shrinking fast. 

And our friend is lost, (the last ! ) 

And the world doth pour its pain. 

Sharper than the frozen rain, — 

There is still a spot of green 

Whence the heavens may be seen. 

" Let us never meet despair 
While the little spot is there ; 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 105 

Winter brightenetli into May, 
And sullen night to sunny day, — 
Seek we then the spot of green 
Whence the heavens may be seen. 

" I have left myself little space for more small-talk. I 
must, therefore, conclude with wishing that your English 
dreams may continue bright, and that when they begin to 
fade you will come and relume at one of the white-bait din- 
ners of which you used to talk in such terms of rapture. 

" Have I space to say that I am very truly yours ? 

" B. W. Procter." 

A few months later, in the same year (1853), he 
sits by his open window in London, on a morn- 
ing of spring, and sends off the following pleasant 
words : — 

" You also must now be in the first burst and sunshine of 
spring. Your spear-grass is showing its points, your suc- 
culent grass its richness, even your little plant [ ? ] (so use- 
ful for certain invalids) is seen here and there ; primroses 
are peeping out in your neighborhood, and you are looking 
for coM-slips to come. 1 say nothing of your hawthorns 
(from the common May to the classic Kathaniel), except that 
I trust they are thriving, and like to put forth a world of 
blossoms soon. 

' With all this wealth, present and future, 
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose,' 

you will doubtless feel disposed to scatter your small coins 
al)road on the poor, and, among other things, to forward to 

your humble correspondent those copies of B C 's 

prose works which you promised I know not how long ago. 
' He who gives sjieedili/,' they say, 'gives twice.' I quote, 
as you see, from the Latins. 

" 1 have just got the two additional volumes of De Quin- 



106 OLD ACQUAIXTAXCE. 

cey, for whicli — thanks ! I have not seen Mr. Parker, who 
brought them, and who left his card here yesterday, but 1 
have asked if he will come and breakfast with me on Sun- 
day, — my only certain leisure day. Your De Quincey is a 
man of a good deal of reading, and has thought on divers 
and sundry matters ; but he is evidently so thoroughly well 
pleased with the Sieur ' Thomas De Quincey ' that his self- 
sufficiency spoils even his best works. Then some of his 
facts are, I hear, quasi facts only, not unfrequently. He 
has his moments when he sleeps, and becomes oblivious of 
all but the aforesaid ' Thomas,' wlio pervades both his 
sleeping and waking visions. I, like all authors, am glad to 
have a little praise now and then (it is my hydromel), but 
it must be dispensed l)y others. I do not think it decent to 
manufacture the sweet liquor myself, and I hate a coxcomb, 
whether in dress or print. 

" We have little or no literary news here. Our poets are 
all going to the poorhouse (except Tennyson), and our prose 
writers are piling up their works for the next 5th of No- 
vember, when there will be a great bonfire. It is deuced 
lucky that my immortal (ah ! I am De Quinceying) — 1 
mean my humble — performances were printed in America, 
so that they will escape. By the by, are they on fools- 
cap ? for I forgot to caution you on that head. 

" I have been spending a week at Liverpool, where I re- 
joiced to hear that Hawthorne's appointment was settled, 
and that it was a valuable post ; but I hear that it lasts for 
three years only. This is melancholy. I hope, however, 
that he will 'realize ' (as you transatlantics say) as much as 
he can during his consulate, and that your next President 
will have the good taste and the good sense to renew his 
lease for three years more. 

" I have not seen Mrs. Stowe. I shall probably meet her 
somcM^here or other when she comes to London. 

" I dare not ask after Mr. Longfellow. He was kind 
enough to write me a very agreeable letter some time ago, 
which I ouorht to have answered. I dare sav that he has for- 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 107 

jrottcn it, but my conscience is a serpent that gives me a bite 
or a sting every now and then when I tliink of him. The 
first time I am in fit condition (I mean in point of brightness) 
to reply to so famous a correspondent, I sliall try what an 
English pen and ink will enable me to say. In the mean 
time, God be thanked for all things ! 

" My wife heard from Thackeray about ten days ago. He 
speaks gratefully of the kindness that he has met with in 
America. Among other things, it appears that he has seen 
something of your slaves, whom he represents as leading a 
very easy life, and as being fat, cheerful, and happy. Nev- 
ertheless, / (for one) would rather be a free man, — such is 
the singularity of my opinions. If my prosings should ever 
in the course of the next twenty years require to be re- 
printed, pray take note of the above opinion. 

" And now I have no more paper ; I have scarcely room 
left to say that I hope you are well, and to remind you that 
for your ten lines of writing I have sent you back a hun- 
dred. Give my best compliments to all whom I know, per- 
sonally or otherwise. God be with you ! 
" Yours, very sincerely, 

"B. W. Procter." 

Procter always seemed to be astounded at the 
travelling spirit of Americans, and in his letters he 
makes frequent reference to our " national propen- 
sity," as he calls it. 

"Half an hovir ago," he writes in July, 1853, "we had 
three of your countrymen here to lunch, — countrymen, I 
mean, Hibernically, for two of them wore petticoats. They 
are all going to Switzerland, France, Italy, Egypt, and 
Syria. What an adventurous race you are, you Americans ! 
Here the women go merely ' from the blue bed to the 
l)rown,' and think that they have travelled and seen the 
world. I myself should not care much to be confined to a 
circle reaching si.v or seven miles round London. There are 



108 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

tlie fresh winds and wild tliyme on Hampstead Heatli, and 
from Richmond you may survey the Naiades. Ilighgate, 
wliere Coleridge lived, Enfield, where Charles Lamh dwelt, 
are not far off. Turning eastward, there is the river Lea, in 
which Izaak Walton fished ; and farther on — ha ! what do 
I see ? What are those little fish frisking in the hatter (the 
great Naval Hospital close hy), which fi.xed the affections of 
the enamored American while he resided in London, and 
have heen floating in his dreams ever since ? They are said 
hy the naturalists to be of the sj)ecies Blandmnenfum, ulhum, 
and are hy vulgar aldermen spoken carelessly of as ivh'ite- 
bait. 

" London is full of carriages, full of strangers, full of par- 
ties feasting on strawberries and ices and other things 
intended to allay the heat of summer; but the Summer 
herself (fickle virgin) keeps back, or has been stopped some- 
where or other, — perhaps at the Liverpool custom-house, 
where the very brains of men (their books) are held in du- 
rance, as I know to my cost. 

" Thackeray is about to publish a new work in numl)ers, 
— a serial, as the newspapers call it. Thomas Carlyle is 
pul)lishing (a si.xpenny matter) in favor of the slave-trade. 
Novelists of all sliades are plying their trades. Husbands 
are killing their M-ives in every day's newspaper. Burglars 
are peaching against each other ; there is no longer honor 
among thieves. I am starting for Leicester on a week's ex- 
pedition amidst the mad people ; and the Emperor of Rus- 
sia has crossed the Pruth, and intends to make a tour of 
Turkey. 

" All this appears to me little better than idle, restless 
vanity. my friend, what a fuss and a pother we are all 
making, we little flies who are going round on the great 
wheel of time ! To-day we are flickering and buzzing al)out, 
our little bits of wings glittering in the sunshine, and to- 
morrow we are safe enough in the little crevice at the back 
of the fireplace, or hid in the folds of the old curtain, shut 
up, stiff and torpid, for the long winter. What do you say 
to that profound reflection ? 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 109 

" I struggle against the lassitude which besets me, and 
strive in vain to be either sensible or jocose. 1 had better 
say farewell." 

On Christmas day, 1854, he writes in rather 
flagging spirits, induced by ill health : — 

" I have owed you a letter for these many months, my 
good friend. I am afraid to think how long, lest the interest 
on the debt should have exceeded the capital, and be be- 
yond my power to pay. 

" You must be good-natured and excuse me, for I have 
been ill — very frequently — and dispirited. A bodily com- 
plaint torments me, that has tormented me for the last two 
years. I no longer look at the world through a rose-colored 
glass. The prospect, I am sorry to say, is gray, grim, dull, 
barren, full of withered leaves, without flowers, or if there 
be any, all of them trampled down, soiled, discolored, and 
without fragrance. You see what a bit of half-smoked 
glass I am looking through. At all events, you must see 
how entirely I am disabled from returning, except in sober 
sentences, the lively and good-natured letters and other 
tilings which you have sent me from America. They were 
welcome, and I thank you for them now, in a few words, as 
you observe, but sincerely. I am somewhat brief, even in 
my gratitude. Had I been in bravej- spirits, I might liave 
spurred my poor Pegasus, and sent you some lines on the 
Alma, or the Inkernian, — bloody battles, but exhibiting 
marks not to be mistaken of the old English heroism, 
which, after all is said a1)out the enervating effects of luxury, 
is as grand and manifest as in the ancient lights which 
English history talks of so much. Even you, sternest of 
republicans, will, I think, be proud of the indomitable cour- 
age of Englishmen, and gladly refer to your old paternity. 
I, at least, should be proud of Americans fighting after the 
same fashion (and without doubt they ivonld fight thus), 
just as old people exult in the brave conduct of their run- 



110 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

away sons. I cannot read of these later battles without 
the tears coming into my eyes. It is said by 'our corre- 
spondent' at Neiv York that the folks there rejoice in the 
losses and disasters of the allies. This can never be the 
case, surely ? No one whose opinion is worth a rap can 
rejoice at any success of the Czar, whose double-dealing 
and unscrupulous greediness must have rendered him an 
ol)ject of loathing to every well-thinking man. But what 
have 1 to do with politics, or you? Our 'pleasant object 
and serene employ ' are books, books. Let us return to 
pacific thoughts. 

" What a number of things have happened since I saw 
you! I looked for you in the last spring, little dreaming 
that so fat and flourishing a ' Statesman ' could be over- 
thrown by a little fever. I had even begun some doggerel, 
announcing to you the advent of the white-bait, which I 
imagined were likely to be all eaten up in your absence. 
My memory is so bad that I cannot recollect half a dozen 
lines, probably not one, as it originally stood. 

" I was at Liverpool last June. After two or three attempts 
1 contrived to seize on the famous Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
Need 1 say that I like him ver\j much? He is very sensi- 
ble, very genial, — a little shy, 1 think (for an American !j — 
and altogether extremely agreeable. I wish that I could 
see more of him, but our orbits are Avide apart. Now and 
then — once in two years — I diverge into and cross liis 
circle, but at other times we are separated by a space 
amounting to 210 miles. He has three ciiildren, and a nice 
little wife, who has good-humor engraved on her counte- 
nance. 

"As to verse — jts, I have begun a dozen trifling things, 
which are in my drawer unfinished ; poor rags with ink 
upon them, none of them, I am afraid, properly labelled for 
posterity. I was for six weeks at Ryde, in the Isle of 
Wight, this year, but so unwell that I could not write, 
a line, scarcely read one; sitting out in the sun, eating, 
drinking, sleeping, and sometimes (poor soul !) imagining I 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. Ill 

was tluiikiiig. One Sunday I sa%v a magnificent steamer 
go l)y, and on placing my eye to the telescope I saw some 
Stars and Stripes (streaming from the mast-head) that car- 
ried me away to Boston. By the way, when will you fin- 
ish the bridge ? 

" I hear strange hints of you all quarrelling about the 
slave question. Is it so? You are so happy and prosperous 
in America that you must be on the lookout for clouds, 
surely ! When you see Emerson, Longfellow, Sumner, 
any one I know, pray bespeak for me a kind thought or 
word from them." 

Procter was always on the lookout for Haw- 
thorne, whom he greatly admired. In November, 
1855, he says, in a brief letter : — 

"I have not seen Hawthorne since I wrote to you. He 
came to London this summer, but, I am sorry to say, did 
not inquire for me. As it turned out, I was aijsent from 
town, but sent him (by Mrs. Russell Sturgis) a letter of in- 
troduction to Leigh Hunt, who was very much pleased with 
him. Poor Hunt ! he is the most genial of men ; and, now 
that his wife is confined to her bed by rheumatism, is re- 
covering himself, and, 1 hope, doing well. He asked to 
come and see me the other day. I willingly assented, and 
when I saw him — grown old and sad and broken down ia 
health — all my ancient liking for him revived. 

" You ask me to send you some verse. I accordingly send 
you a scrap of recent manufacture, and you will observe that 
instead of forwarding my epic on Sevastopol, I select some- 
thing that is fitter for these present vernal love days thaa 
the bluster of heroic verse : — 

" SONG. 

" Witliin the chambers of her breast 
Love lives and makes his spicy nest. 



112 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

Midst downy blooms and fragrant flowers, 
And there lie dreams away tlie hours — 

There let him rest ! 
Some time hence, when the cuckoo sings, 
I 'II come by night and bind his wing,, — 
Hind him that he shall not roam 
I'roin his warm white virgin home, 

" Maiden of the summer season. 

Angel of the rosy time. 
Come, unless some graver reason 

Bid thee scorn my rhyme ; 
Come from thy serener height, 
On a golden cloud descending, 
Come ere Love hath taken fligiit, 
And let thy stay be like the light. 
When its glory hath no ending 

In the Northern night ! " 

Now and then we get a glimpse of Thackeray in 
his letters. In one of them he says : — 

" Thackeray came a few days ago and read one of his lec- 
tures at our house (that on George the Third), and we 
asked about a dozen persons to come and hear it, among the 

rest, your liandsome countrywoman, Mrs. R S . It 

was very pleasant, with that agreeable intermixture of 
tragedy and comedy that tells so well when judiciously 
managed. He will not print them for some time to come, 
intending to read them at some of the principal places in 
England, and perhaps Scotland. 

"What are you doing in America? You are too happy 
and independent ! ' fortunatos Agricolas, sua si bona 
norint ! ' I am not quite sure of my Latin (which is rusty 
from old age), but I am sure of the sentiment, which is that 
when people are too happy, they don't know it, and so take 
to quarrelling to relieve the monotony of their blue sky. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 113 

Some of these days you will split your great kingdom iu 
two, I sui)])Ose, and then — 

" My wife's mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, is very ill, and 
we aie apprehensive of a fatal result, Mhicli, in truth, the 
mere fact of her age (eighty-two or eighty-three) is enough 
to warrant. Ah, this terrible age ! The young people, I 
dare say, think that we live too long. Yet how short it is to 
look back on life ! Why, 1 saw the house the other day 
where I used to play with a wooden sword when I was fi\e 
years old ! It cannot surely be eiglity years ago ! What 
has occurred since ? Why, nothing tliat is worth putting 
down on paper. A few nonsense verses, a Hogging or two 
(richly deserved), and a few white-bait dinners, and the 
whole is reckoned up. Let us begin again." [Here he 
makes some big letters in a school-boy hand, which have a 
very patlietic look on the page.] 

In a letter written in 1856 he gives me a graphic 
picture of sad times in India : — 

" AH our an.xiety here at present is tlie Indian mutiny. 
We ourselves have great cause for trouble. Our son (the 
only son 1 have, indeed) escaped from Delhi lately. He is 
now at Meerut. He and four or live otlier officers, four 
women, and a child escaped. The men Avere obliged to 
drop the women a fearful lieiglit from the walls of the fort, 
amidst showers of bullets. A round shot passed Avitliin a 
yard of my son, and one of the ladies liad a bullet through 
her shoulder. They were seven days and seven nights in 
the jungle, without money or meat, scarcely any clothes, no 
shoes. They forded rivers, lay on the wet ground at night, 
lapped water from the puddles, and finally reached Meerut. 
The lady (the mother of the three other ladies) had not her 
wound dressed, or seen, indeed, for upward of a week. 
Their feet were full of thorns. My son had nothing but a 
shirt, a pair of trousers, and a flannel waistcoat. How 
they contrived to live I don't know ; I suppose from small 
gifts of rice, etc., from the natives. 



114: OLD ACQUAIXTANCE. 

" When I find any little thing now that distnrbs ray se- 
renity, and which I might in former times have magnified 
into an evil, 1 think of what Europeans suffer from the 
vengeance of the Indians, and pass it by in quiet. 

"I received Mr. Hillard's epitapli on my dear kind friend 
Kenyon. Thank him in my name for it. There are some 
copies to he reserved of a lithograph now in progress (a por- 
trait of Kenyon) for his American friends. ShouUl it be 
completed in time, Mr. Sumner will be asked to take them 
over. 1 have put down your name for one of those who would 
wish to have this little memento of a good kind man 

" 1 shall never visit x\merica, be assured, or the continent 
of Europe, or any distant region. I have reached nearly to 
the length of my tether. I have grown old and apathetic 
and stupid. All I care for, in the way of personal enjoy- 
ment, is quiet, ease, — to have nothing to do, nothing to 
think of. My only glance is backward. There is so little 
before me that I would rather not look that way." 

In a later letter he again speaks of his son and 
the war in India : — 

"My son is not in the list of killed and wounded, thank 
God! He was before Delhi, liaviug vohmteered thither after 
his escape. We trust that he is at present safe, but every 
mail is pregnant with bloody tidings, and we do not find 
ourselves yet in a jjosition to rejoice securely. What a 
terrible war this Indian war is ! Are all people of black 
blood cruel, cowardly, and treacherous? If it were a case 
of great oppression on our part, I could understand and 
(almost) excuse it ; but it is from the spoiled portion of the 
Hindostanees that the revengeful mutiny has arisen. One 
thing is quite clear, that whatever luxury and refinement 
have done for our race (for I include Americans with Eng- 
lish), they have not diminished the coiwage and endurance 
and heroism for which I think we have formerly been fa- 
mous. We are the same Sa.\ons still. There has never 



OLD ACQUAIXTAXCE. 115 

been fiercer figlitins; tlian in some of the battles that hav« 
lately taken place in India. When I look back on the old 
liistory books, and see that all history consists of little else 
than the bloody feuds of nation with nation, I almost won- 
der that God has not extinguished the cruel, selfish animals 
that we dignify with the name of men. No — I cry for- 
giveness : let the women live, if they can, without the men. 
1 used the word ' men ' only." 

Here is a pleasant paragraph about "Aurora 
Leigh " : — 

"The most successful book of the season has been Mrs. 
Browning's ' Aurora Leigh. ' I could wish some things altered, 
3 confess ; but as it is, it is by far (a hundred times over) the 
finest poem ever written by a woman. "We know little or 
nothing of Sappho, — notliing to induce comparison, — and all 
other wearers of petticoats must courtesy to the ground." 

In several of his last letters to me there are 
frequent allusions to our civil war. Here is an 
extract from an epistle written in 1861: — 

" We read with painful attention the accounts of your 
great quarrel in America. We know nothing beyond what 
we are told by the New York papers, and these are the 
stories of one of the combatants. I am afraid that, however 
you may mend the schism, you will never be so strong 
again. I hope, however, that something may arise to ter- 
minate the bloodshed ; for, after all, fisrhting is an unsatis- 
factory way of coming at the truth. If you were to stand 
up at once (and finally) against the slave-trade, your band 
of soldiers would have a more decided prhutpJe to fight for. 
But — 

" — But I really know little or nothing. 1 hope that at 
Boston you are comparatively peaceful, and I know that you 
are more abolitionist than in the more southern countries. 

"There is uotliing new doing here in the wav of books. 



116 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

The last hook I have seen is called ' Taunhauser,' puhlished 
hy Chapman and Hall, — a poem nnder feigned names, hut 
realhj written hy Rohert Lytton and Julian Fane. It is not 
good enough for the first, l)ut (as I conjecture) too good for 
the last. The songs which decide the contest of the bards 
are the worst portions of the Ijook. 

" I read some time ago a novel which has not made much 
noise, but whiciiis prodigiously clever, — ' City and Suburb.' 
The story hangs in parts, but it is full of weighty sentences. 
We have no poet since Tennyson except Robert Lytton, 
who, yon know, calls himself Owen Meredith. Poetry in 
England is assuming a new character, and not a better 
character. It has a sort of pre-Raphaelite tendency which 
does not suit my aged feelings. I am for Love, or the 
World well lost. But I forget that, if I live beyond the 21st 
of next November, I shall be seventy-fovr years of age. I 
have been obliged to resign my Commissionership of Lu- 
nacy, not being able to bear the pain of travelling. By this 
I lose about £ 900 a year. I am, therefore, sufficiently 
poor even for a poet. Browning, as you know, has lost his 
wife. He is coming with his little boy to live in England. 
I rejoice at this, for I think that the English should live 
in England, especially in their youth, when people learn 
things that they never forget afterward." 

Near the close of 1864 lie writes : — 

"Since I last lieard from you, nothing except what is 
melancholy seems to have taken place. You seem all busy 
killing each other in America. Some friends of yours and 
several friends of mine have died. Among the last I can- 
not help ])lacing Nathaniel Hawthorne, for whom I had a 

sincere regard He was al)out your best prose writer, 

I think, and intermingled with his humor was a great deal 
of tenderness. To die so soon ! 

"You are so easily affronted in America, if we (English) 
say anything about putting an end to your war, that I will 
not venture to hint at the subject. Nevertheless, I wish 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 117 

that you were all at peace again, for your own sakes and 
for the sake of human nature. I detest fighting now, al- 
though 1 was a great admirer of fighting ni my youth, lly 
youth ? I wonder where it has gone. It has left me with 
gray hairs and rheumatism, and plenty of (too many other) 
intirmities. I stagger and stumljle along, M'lth almost sev- 
enty-six years on my head, upon failing limbs, which no 
longer enable me to Avalk half a mile. 1 see a great deal, all 
behind nie (the Past), but the prospect before me is not 
cheerful. Sometimes I wish that 1 had tried harder for 
what IS called Fame, but generally (as now) I care very 
little about it. After all, — unless one could be Shakespeare, 
which (clearly) is not an easy matter, — of what value is a 
little puff of smoke from a review ? If we could settle perma- 
nently who is to be the Homer or Shakespeare of our time, it 
might be worth something ; but we cannot. Is it Jones, 

or Smith, or ? Alas! 1 get short-sighted on this point, 

and cannot penetrate the impenetrable dark. Make my 
remembrances acceptable to Longfellow, to Lowell, to Em- 
erson, and to any one else who remembers me. 
" Yours, ever sincerely, 

"B. W. Procter." 

And here are a few paragraphs from the last letter 
I ever received from Procter's loving hand: — 

" Although I date this from "Weymouth Street, yet I am 
writing 14-0 or 150 miles away from Loudon. Perhaps 
this temporary retreat from our great, noisy, turbulent city 
reminds me that I have been very unmindful of your letter, 
received long ago. Bat I have been busy, and my writ- 
ing now is not a simple matter, as it was fifty years ago. 
I have great difficulty in forming tlie letters, and you would 
be surprised to learn with what labor this task is performed. 
Then I have been incessantly occupied in writing (I refer to 
the mechatiical part only) the ' Memoir of Charles Lamb.' It 
is not my book, — i. e. not my property, — but one which I 



118 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

was hired to write, and it forms my last earnings. You 
will have lieard of the book (perhaps seen it) some time 
since. It has Ijeen very well received. I would not have 
engaged myself on anything else, hut I had great regard 
for Charles Laml), and so (somehow or other) I have con- 
trived to reach the end. 

"I have already (long ago) written something about Haz- 
litt, but I have received more than one application for it, 
in case I can manage to complete my essay. As in the case 
of Lamb, I am really the only person living who knew much 
about his daily life. I have not, however, quite the same 
incentixe to carry me on. Indeed, I am not certain that I 
should be al)le to travel to the real Finis. 

" My wife is very grateful for the copies of my dear Ade- 
laide's poems wliicli you sent her. She appears surprised 
to hear that I have not transmitted her thanks to you be- 
fore. 

" We get the ' Atlantic Monthly ' regularly. I need not 
tell you how much better tlie poetry is than at its com- 
mencement. Very good is 'Released,' in the July number, 
and several of the stories; but they are in London, and I 
cannot particularize them. 

" We were very much pleased with Colonel Holmes, the 
son of your friend and contributor. He seems a very intel- 
ligent, modest young man ; as little military as need be, and, 
like Coriolanus, not baring his wounds (if he has any) for 
public gaze. Wlien you see Dr. Holmes, pray tell him how 
much I and my wife liked his son. 

"We are at the present moment rusticating at Malvern 
Wells. We are on the side of a great hill (which yon would 
call small in America), and our intercourse is only with the 
flowers and bees and swallows of the season. Sometimes 
we encounter a wasp, which I suppose comes from over 
seas ! 

"The Storys are living two or three miles off, and called 
upon us a few days ago. You have not seen lih Sibyl, which 
I think very fine, and as containing a renj great future. But 



OLD ACQUAIXTAXCE. 119 

U.e young poets generally disa])point us, and are too content 
with startling us into admiration of their tirst works, and 
then go to sleep. 

" I wish that I had, when younger, made more notes 
about my contemporaries ; for, being of no faction in politics, 
it happens that I have knoM-n far more literary men than 
any other person of my time. In counting up the names of 
persons known to me who were, in some way or other, con- 
nected with literature, I reckoned up more than one hun- 
dred. But then I have had more than sixty years to do this 
in. My tirst acquaintance of this sort was Bowles, the 
poet. This was about lb05. 

" Although I can scarcely write, I am able to say, in con- 
clusion, that I am 

" Very sincerely yours, 

" B. \V. PUOCTER." 

Procter was an ardent student of the Avorks of 
our older English dramatists, and he had a special 
fondness for such writers as Decker, Marlowe, Hey- 
wood, Webster, and Fletcher. INIany of his own 
dramatic scenes are modelled on that passionate and 
romantic school. He had great relish for a good 
modern novel, too ; and I recall the titles of several 
which he recommended warmly for my perusal and 
republication in America. "When I first came to 
know him, the duties of his office as a Commis- 
sioner obliged him to travel about the kingdom, 
sometimes on long journeys, and he told me his 
pocket companion was a cheap reprint of Emerson's 
" Essays," which he found such agreeable reading 
that he never left home without it. Longfellow's 
" Hyperion " was another of his favorite books dur- 
ing the years he was on duty. 



120 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

Among the last agreeable visits I made to the old 
poet was one with reference to a proposition of his 
own to omit several songs and other short poems 
from a new issue of his works then in press. I 
stoutly opposed the ignoring of certain old favorites 
of mine, and the poet's wife joined with me in de- 
ciding against the author in his proposal to cast 
aside so many beautiful songs, — • songs as well 
worth saving as any in the volume. Procter ar- 
gued that, being past seventy, he had now reached 
to years of discretion, and that his judgment ought 
to be followed without a murmur. I held out firm 
to the end of our discussion, and we settled the 
matter with this compromise : he was to expunge 
whatever he chose from the English edition, but I 
was to have my own way with the American one. 
So to this day the American reprint is the only 
complete collection of Barry Cornwall's earliest 
pieces, for I held on to all the old lyrics, without 
discarding a single line. 

The poet's figure was short and full, and his voice 
had a low, veiled tone habitually in it, which made 
it sometimes difficult to hear distinctly what he 
was saying. When in conversation, he liked to be 
very near his listener, and thus stand, as it were, 
on confidential ground with him. His turn of 
thought was cheerful among his friends, and he 
proceeded readily into a vein of wit and nimble 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 121 

expression. A^erbal felicity seemed natural to him, 
and his epithets, evidently unprepared, were always 
perfect. He disliked cant and hard Avays of judg- 
ing chai'acter. He praised easily. He had no wish 
to stand in anybody's shoes hut his own, and he 
said, " There is no literary vice of a darker shade 
than envy." Talleyrand's recipe for perfect happi- 
ness was the opposite to his. He impressed every 
one who came near him as a born gentleman, chival- 
rous and generous in a marked degree, and it was the 
habit of those who knew him to have an affection 
for him. Altering a line of Pope, this counsel might 
have been safely tendered to all the authors of his 
day, — 

" Disdain whatever Procter's mind disdaius.". 



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YESTERDAYS WITH AUTHORS. 

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Contents : 

INTRODUCTORY. — THACKERAY. — HAWTHORNE. 
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